Searches for New Physics with Colliders and Cosmology

University Of Notre Dame, Notre Dame IN

Investigators

Abstract

This award funds the research activities of Professors Antonio Delgado, Adam Martin, and Yuhsin Tsai at the University of Notre Dame. The goal of theoretical particle physics is to understand the fundamental building blocks of the universe around us. There are two avenues towards this achieving this goal. The first is to analyze collisions of protons slammed together at the highest energies available, with the goal of investigating the elementary particles and their interactions at very short length scales. The second is to study the history of the universe through the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation --- i.e., radiation from a very early epoch in the evolution of the universe --- as well as through other cosmological signals. Pursuing both of these directions, Professors Delgado, Martin, and Tsai will conduct research that casts a wide net for signals of new physics using a variety of techniques. As such, this research advances the national interest by promoting the progress of science towards illuminating the principal laws of nature. This work also has a broad impact in that it will guide future experimental searches and involves close collaboration with experimenters, both at Notre Dame and at CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics). Professors Delgado, Martin, and Tsai will also teach physics at the undergraduate and graduate levels, lecture at graduate physics summer schools, organize workshops and conferences around the world, and teach particle physics to high school teachers and students through the QuarkNet program, both nationally and internationally. More technically, Professor Martin will work on improving effective field theory-based searches for new phenomena, with particular emphasis on the uncertainties from higher order terms. Professor Delgado will study novel signals from R-parity violating supersymmetry. He will also study Dark Matter model building in supersymmetry and more general two-Higgs-doublet models. Professor Tsai will adapt existing cosmology computer codes to study how dark photons and Mirror Twin Higgs models can be bounded by current and future cosmological observations. Finally, Professors Martin and Tsai will together study ‘hotspot' signals in the CMB from pairs of super-heavy particles created in the early universe This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.