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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

Much remains to be understood about the origin and evolution of our universe's largest supermassive black holes (SMBHs). In this talk, I motivate the possibility that some fraction of these SMBHs may be primordial in origin,…

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Marios Galanis

In this talk I will do three things. First, I will outline the conditions under which the interaction rate of inelastic processes with a system consisting of N targets scales as N^2. Second, I will present computations of interaction rates for…

Image caption:

Marios Galanis

In this talk I will do three things. First, I will outline the conditions under which the interaction rate of inelastic processes with a system consisting of N targets scales as N^2. Second, I will present computations of interaction rates for…

Axions, originally proposed to solve the strong CP problem, are a well-motivated dark matter candidate. While many experiments have searched for axion dark matter across a broad mass range, the meV mass region remains less explored. In this talk…

The 2021 Robert Hofstadter Memorial Lectures: Spin dynamics of ultracold atoms in optical lattices

Ultracold atoms offer a unique platform to study spin physics. When atoms are arranged in an optical lattice in form of a Mott insulator, the atomic motion is frozen out and the study and control of the spin degree of freedom emerges as a new…

The quantum chromodynamics axion is a well motivated new physics candidate that can explain the strong-CP problem related to the neutron electric dipole moment in addition to the dark matter (DM) in our Universe.  However, if the axion is…

The classical equations of motion of a quantum field theory are obtained by minimizing an action. When we apply this procedure to a gauge theory, there is an interesting issue. The variation of the classical action along a gauge direction is zero…

Robert Laughlin

This colloquium will be given by Nobel laureate Professor Robert Laughlin of the Stanford Physics Department.

Professor Laughlin's abstract:

I invoke physical principles to address the question of how living things might…

When DM bosons have an ultra-light mass, they can act as a classical, coherent field. In many cases, and specifically in some ALP models, this field has magnetic properties, and it can therefore be measured by quantum magnetometers. The Noble and…