Daniele Alves
Tanmoy Bhattacharya
Michael Graesser
Rajan Gupta
Elementary particle or high-energy physics is defined by the quest to discover, at the heart of Nature, the most fundamental particles and forces that govern or underlie all physical phenomena in our Universe. Although the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics (the three known families of quarks & leptons, Higgs boson, and carriers of the electroweak and strong forces) has spectacularly passed every experimental test thrown at it on earth, by itself it signals its own incompleteness as it fails to explain enormous features of our Universe such as the nature of dark matter, the amount of ordinary matter in the Universe, or how gravity, the weakest and yet most influential force on large scales in the Universe, fits in a consistent quantum description with the other particles and forces.
The quest to uncover signals of new physics beyond the SM is shared with nuclear physics (NP), especially the fundamental symmetry thrust in NP. High-energy physics strategies for discovering new physics are focused on high-energy particle colliders that attempt to directly create new particles by creating enormous energy that may convert into new heavy particles, as well as large-scale, heavy, or novel detectors that may register signatures of interactions with elusive dark matter particles (such as axions). The detection of such subtle signatures requires innovation in quantum sensing technologies, in computational technologies to tease small signals out of enormously large data sets, and high-precision field theoretic computations of SM backgrounds to ensure maximal signal-to-background ratios.
The NPAC group performs research into developing theoretical models of new physics particles and forces, motivating new detection methods and technologies to expand the parameter space of dark matter or new physics particles that we can have sensitivity to, and, notably, in large-scale lattice computations of fundamental quantities in quantum field theory (QFT) that must be known precisely in order to make predictions for observations aimed at BSM discoveries and to interpret measurements in terms of fundamental theoretical descriptions.
These areas of leadership in lattice QCD/QFT and BSM model building are closely linked to the expertise of the nuclear theory team in Effective Field Theory (especially Standard Model EFT and chiral EFT) that ties together physics at low-energy scales where many observations are made (and properties and interactions of neutrons, protons, and other hadrons are computed in lattice QCD) to the high-energy scales where new physics particles and forces should exist. EFT makes these connections across scales in a rigorous, calculable manner with computable uncertainties, crucial for reliable scientific interpretation and discoveries.
Particle, nuclear, and astrophysics all bear on and are intertwined in the quest to find BSM physics, and new computational technologies not only in classical lattice field theory but also machine-learning-enhanced techniques and quantum computing techniques will be required to tackle the numerical and nonperturbative predictions required in this effort.
