Particle Theory

The particle theory group, led by Professors Andrew Cohen, Sheldon Glashow, Emanuel Katz, Ken Lane, So-Young Pi, Claudio Rebbi, Martin Schmaltz and Richard Brower (joint with College of Engineering), has continued a very active and diversified program of research, obtaining results in electroweak and flavor physics, collider phenomenology, model building and effective field theories, relativity, cosmology and astrophysics, and non-perturbative investigations of quantum field theories.

Cohen, Katz, Schmaltz and collaborators have investigated the Little Higgs mechanism for electroweak symmetry breaking, co-invented by Cohen a few years ago, as well as other extensions of the electroweak theory.

Cohen and Glashow have continued their exploration of a new form of Lorentz symmetry breaking which they called “Very Special Relativity” (VSR), showing in particular that neutrino masses with a VSR origin would have several possible experimental consequences, both for neutrino experiments as well as for precision charged lepton measurements.

Schmaltz and collaborators at Berkeley have demonstrated that there are new physics scenarios which could be discovered at the LHC even at very low luminosity and energy.

Brower and Rebbi have studied non-perturbative properties of QCD by lattice techniques. Recently, working in a large national collaboration, they have extended these techniques to the study of models of electroweak symmetry breaking based on strong dynamics. They have also obtained pioneering results on the application of multigrid methods and GPUs (graphics processing units) to lattice simulations.

Brower, Katz and collaborators have pursued the holographic approach to QCD: using string theory and the so called AdS/CFT correspondence they have obtained results on the hadron spectrum and on the hard and soft components of high energy scattering.

Pi has investigated fermion fractionalization, a phenomenon where solutions to the field equations for fields with integer charges are found to carry fractional charges. She has explored the physics of fractionalization in different field theories in varying numbers of dimensions and with applications to both particle physics and condensed matter systems.

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