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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

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

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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…

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Crucial measurements were made at the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector in Japan

Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald led two teams which made key observations of the particles inside big underground instruments in Japan…
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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

The exchange of a pair of neutrinos can mediate a long-range force. This "neutrino force" is a unique quantum force predicted by the Standard Model; it is also sensitive to the nature of the neutrino mass. Yet, this force is too weak to be…

In this talk I explore the physics potential of forward muon detection at muon colliders for probing neutral effective vector boson production across various kinematic regimes. Vectors with relatively low energy produce the Higgs boson…

It is difficult to construct a post-inflation QCD axion model that solves the axion quality problem (and hence the Strong CP problem) without introducing a cosmological disaster. In a post-inflation axion model, the axion field value is…

Determining the tail of probability distributions is an important topic in many physical settings. For classical stochastic systems, much about these processes has been understood using the large deviation principle. Much less is known in quantum…

I will explain how we can search for light Dark Matter by detecting small amounts of phonons in specific crystals. To calculate the scattering rates, we must use methods from computational condensed matter physics within the context of particle…

A self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) halo begins to thermalize once its age is comparable to the (inverse of the) self-interaction rate. Such thermalized self-gravitating systems are know to be unstable due to the so-called "Gravo-Thermal…

We have long celebrated the great success of cosmology in predicting the observed properties of the cosmic microwave background.  And yet, for well over two decades there has been consistent and slowly mounting evidence that on large scales…

We propose a new approach to measure the CP-violating phase in neutrino mixing using atmospheric neutrinos, improving upon prior work. Because it is subject to systematic uncertainties that differ from those affecting accelerator-based…

New millicharged particles—particles with weak electromagnetic interactions, either through an explicit photon coupling or through a kinetically-mixed hidden photon—are a well-motivated dark matter candidate. Previous models of millicharged dark…