Martin Schmaltz

I am interested in understanding what may lie beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics. The Standard Model's only remaining undiscovered particle, the Higgs boson, is currently being searched for at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Many theoretical particle physicists including myself have been convinced by hints from previous experiments that the Higgs boson exists, and that it will be discovered at the LHC. While this discovery will be a tremendous success for our efforts to understand the Physics of electroweak symmetry breaking, this will not close the chapter on the Higgs or on the Standard Model. The trouble is that even with the discovery of the Higgs particle we will still not have understood why there are three generations of quarks and leptons, why they have their peculiar pattern of masses and mixing, what makes up the Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe, and why CP symmetry is violated only in the weak interactions. And even the Higgs particle itself poses new questions because in the Standard Model the potential energy of the Higgs field suffers from a quantum instability. Attempts at curing this instability have motivated much of my work in the past on Supersymmetry, Extra Dimensions and Little Higgs Theories.

Most recently, I have been interested in a number of curious anomalies in data from experiments at the LHC and the Tevatron. One of the anomalies is an asymmetry in the direction in which top quarks are produced in the CDF and D0 experiments at the Tevatron. Measurements from both experiments seem to indicate an asymmetry of order 20% whereas the Standard Model can account for at most 10% asymmetry. My student Gustavo and I proposed the existence of a new particle which might quantum mechanically interfere with the Standard Model production of top quarks and explain the asymmetry. Our model makes predictions for particle jet productions at the LHC experiments which are currently being tested. Here are slides from a recent seminar I gave on the top quark asymmetry at Stony Brook.

I am also working on an apparent discrepancy between prediction and measurements in the production rates of photons at the LHC. My research shows that there is an important  production mechanism in which two partons from the initial protons collide to produce two partons and two photons in the final state. This production mechanism had previously been considered unimportant but we can show that it makes a significant contribution and can explain the discrepancy.