New Pathways Connecting Theory and Experiment

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award funds the research activities of Professors Hitoshi Murayama and Lawrence Hall at the University of California, Berkeley. With the advent of the Large Hadron Collider, advances in observational cosmology, and progress in underground experiments, modern high-energy physics has entered a data-rich era. As part of their research, Professors Murayama and Hall aim to investigate and create critical ties between theory and experiment by building new theories, working out their predictions, and proposing new ideas for experiments to test. This research is guided by the goal of uncovering deep secrets that span from the smallest scales of particles and strings to the largest scales of the Universe, including collider physics, dark matter, neutrinos, quark flavor, and observational cosmology. This research is therefore in the national interest, furthering the development of fundamental science within the United States. This research is also envisioned to have significant broader impacts. Professors Murayama and Hall will train graduate and undergraduate students who will collaborate with them on their research, and will also reach out to high-school teachers and their students through the QuarkNet framework. They will also give public lectures, many of which will be recorded and made available on YouTube. Finally, they will continue their significant leadership roles within the broader particle-physics community. More technically, Professor Murayama's funded research has two major components. The first is physics beyond the Standard Model, in particular building models of dark matter, dark energy, supersymmetry, and neutrinos, and studying their phenomenologies. By contrast, the second focuses on formal aspects of field theory, in particular its mathematical structure and its relevance to other areas of physics. Professor Hall will investigate several different new ideas concerning the possibility of a heavy QCD axion, possible gravity waves from late reheating, cosmological implications of Higgs parity, and implications of parity restoration for neutrino masses and flavor. 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.