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
A Path to Detecting Self-Interacting Dark Matter using Astrophysical Sub-Structure
Dark matter self interactions can leave distinctive signatures on the properties of satellite…
PQ Axiverse
I construct a landscape of vacua of string theory and study the resulting ensemble of N-axion…
Related News
Credit: Harrison Truong
The hierarchy problem, the puzzlingly light mass of the Higgs, is one of the largest open questions in physics beyond the Standard Model…
Crucial measurements were made at the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector in Japan
Slowly gathering energy
Pascal Boegli/Getty
Kicking the world’s largest machine into overdrive is turning out to be harder than expected. Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider…
Last night the Operations team for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) successfully circulated a beam at 6.5 teralectronvolts…
Related Events
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…
We study fuzzy axion dark matter in type IIB string theory, for axions descending from the Ramond-Ramond four-form in compactifications on orientifolds of Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces. Such models can be tested by cosmological measurements if a…
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…
In this talk, I will present a novel mechanism for gravitational wave generation from spectator scalar fields in the early universe. Spectator scalar fields with masses below the inflationary scale can produce significant isocurvature power…
The fundamental physics governing cosmic inflation remains unknown. A variety of proposed scenarios predict the existence of spectator fields during inflation. While such fields do not drive inflation, they can play important roles in the post-…
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…
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…
High-energy (HE; ~100 GeV to 100 PeV) and ultrahigh-energy (UHE; >~ 100 PeV) neutrinos are crucial for both particle physics and astrophysics, e.g., offering great opportunities to study neutrino interactions…
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…