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Beyond The Standard Model

The Standard Model of particle physics is amazingly successful, yet it leaves many basic questions unanswered.  From bizarre, unexplained parameters such as the cosmological constant, Higgs mass, or neutron electric dipole moment to the lack of explanation for observed phenomena such as dark matter and baryogenesis, there is strong evidence that the Standard Model must be extended.  At SITP we have focused on finding solutions to these open problems to discover what these hints tell us about the underlying laws of physics.

Video Briefs

Dark matter self interactions can leave distinctive signatures on the properties of satellite…

I construct a landscape of vacua of string theory and study the resulting ensemble of N-axion…

Related News

Dr. Racco's research during his SITP postdoctoral appointment has been awarded the Third Prize of the 2023 Buchalter Cosmology Prize.

Peter Graham

If the electron’s charge wasn’t perfectly round, it could reveal the existence of hidden particles. A new measurement approaches…

Peter Graham is interested in discovering the fundamental laws of nature that lie beyond the known standard model. He received an A.B./A…

Image credit: L.A. Cicero

The history of particle accelerators is one of seemingly constant one-upmanship. Ever since the 1920s, the machines – which spur charged…

Credit: Harrison Truong

A team of Stanford University researchers are on a mission to identify dark matter once and for all. But first, they'll need to build the…

The hierarchy problem, the puzzlingly light mass of the Higgs, is one of the largest open questions in physics beyond the Standard Model…

Related Events

The process of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) is a crucial test of cosmology. In this talk, I will describe a new code for predicting the primordial elemental abundance due to BBN. This code takes advantage of JAX, a machine learning framework,…

Dark matter can be captured in stars and planets after scattering and losing sufficient energy to become gravitationally bound. I will discuss a new framework to describe what happens when dark matter is captured by these objects, and demonstrate…

The baryon sector of the present universe is almost entirely matter and no antimatter. High energy astrophysical events can only produce a tiny amount of antimatter, a minuscule fraction of which may form nuclear bound states.  Given the…

Dark matter (DM) freeze-in through a light mediator is an appealing model with excellent detection prospects at current and future experiments. Light mediator freeze-in is UV-insensitive insofar as most DM is produced at late times, and thus the…

Fermi LAT has revealed an excess from the Galactic center that is compatible with a signal of dark matter annihilation, but other interpretations such as a population of millisecond pulsars have been found compelling. More recently, an excess…

A dark force, which is a necessary ingredient of self-interacting dark matter models, can lead to gravothermal collapse of dark matter in small mass halos. This talk will review the physics of gravothermal collapse and highlight new results…

SITP sign on 3rd floor of the Varian Physics Building

Heavy axions can arise in the context of Grand Unified theories where a confining dark gauge group unifies with the Standard Model (SM) gauge group. Depending on the strength of the axion coupling to the SM, heavy axion lifetimes can vary…

For several years, various experimental results on B meson decays show persistent discrepancies with respect to Standard Model expectations. Discrepancies are observed in branching ratios, angular distributions, and lepton flavor universality…

Cosmological measurements are playing a central role in our understanding of the physics related to dark sectors, in particular related to dark matter. Currently there are some noticeable tensions appearing in the data when it is interpreted…