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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 near equality of the dark matter and baryon energy densities is a remarkable coincidence, especially when one realizes that the baryon mass is exponentially sensitive to UV parameters in the form of dimensional transmutations. We explore a…

We propose a novel baryogenesis scenario where the baryon asymmetry originates directly from a hierarchy between two fundamental mass scales: the electroweak scale (v) and the Planck scale (M_P), in the form of Y_B ∼ √(v/M_P). This relation…

Coherent enhancement is a powerful mechanism for improving the sensitivity of a wide range of detectors, but its practical use is often limited by the difficulty of preparing the required quantum states. In this talk, I will show that this…

Theoretically well motivated models of dark matter such as inelastic dark matter (including the last surviving electroweak WIMP, the pseudo-Dirac Higgsino) and strongly interacting dark matter (Dirac Gluino bound states) possess…

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,…

Primordial black holes (PBHs)—black holes formed in the early universe by mechanisms other than stellar collapse—were first posited by Hawking and Carr in 1975. Fifty years later, as particle dark matter candidates continue to elude direct…

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Katherine Fraser

Measurements of the flavor structure of the Standard Model can be precise probes of physics beyond it. In this talk, we describe two implications of various flavor physics measurements. First, we discuss the use of Froggatt-Nielsen (FN) models…

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…