Grant: Subatomic Physics Envelope - Individual

The goal of my research is to understand the most fundamental constituents of energy and matter. This involves studying both the very smallest and the very largest length scales we are able to probe. Our current understanding of the basic constituents of nature is incomplete, and this has lead particle physicists to propose the existence of new elementary particles and forces. The most promising candidates include a new property of spacetime called supersymmetry, and new spatial dimensions of space that we can't see because they are are very small and curled up upon themselves. If either of these proposals is correct, we are likely to observe them in the next few years at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment. The primary focus of my research is to try to make sense of and to help discover these possibilities for new phenomena beyond what we have discovered so far. Our current understanding of particle physics is also unable to explain what we observe over the very largest length scales, greater than the size of a galaxy. By probing the very large-scale structure of the universe, we are able obtain information about the very first moments after the Big Bang, when the universe was a hot soup of elementary particles. What is observed indicates that there must exist new particles and forces beyond what we have discovered so far. Upcoming astrophysical measurements will soon tell us more about what these exotic particles and forces. The second major focus of my research is to try to deduce what these new phenomena are, and to relate them to the particles and forces we might observe at the LHC and other subatomic experiments.