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…
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The QCD axion provides an elegant solution to the Strong CP problem and could be some or all of the dark matter of our universe. This prospect, however, is challenged when taking into account symmetry breaking effects from quantum gravity,…
Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) is a powerful tool for probing both new physics and LCDM, and complements analyses utilizing the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and results from particle experiment. I will provide two examples of BBN…
A terrestrial population of room-temperature millicharged particles can arise if they make up a dark matter subcomponent or if they are light enough to be produced in cosmic ray air showers. In this talk, I'll show that a simple electrified shell…
The paradigm of minimal electroweak dark matter remains one of our simplest and best-studied theories of particle DM; most of these scenarios are also as of yet entirely experimentally unprobed. In this talk, I discuss recent and ongoing progress…
We discuss unusual θ terms that can appear in field theories that allow global vortices. These "Cheshire θ terms" induce Aharonov-Bohm effects for some particles that move around vortices. For example, a Cheshire θ term can appear in QCD coupled…
Ultralight dark matter candidates with masses below 1 eV are often considered to behave "classically". By this, one typically means that the dark matter exists in a coherent state (of the harmonic oscillator defined by the creation/annihilation…
Models of dark sectors with a mass threshold can have important cosmological signatures. When a relativistic species becomes non-relativistic before recombination and is then depopulated in equilibrium, measurable effects on the CMB arise as…
There are a variety of experimental and astrophysical constraints on non-gravitational interactions of dark matter, both with itself and with the Standard Model. Most of these constraints assume that such interactions are short-ranged, however,…
We showcase cosmology's ability to constrain long-range forces between dark matter particles. Specifically, we consider a fermionic dark matter interacting via a Yukawa-coupled light scalar, focusing on regimes where the dark forces are stronger…