Grant: Subatomic Physics Envelope - Individual

My research deals with the elementary building blocks of nature. I perform calculations to help figure out what these fundamental constituents could be and how they interact with each other. The results of these calculations help to guide experimental efforts to discover and probe what we are made at an ever more detailed level. One of the major topics of my research is the Higgs boson. This particle plays a pivotal role in our theoretical understanding of the origins of mass, and can explain why the weak force is so much weaker than electromagnetism. However, despite many years of searching we still have not yet discovered the Higgs. In the next few years the Tevatron and LHC high energy particle colliders will almost certainly be capable of finding the Higgs if it exists. An important part of my research is to make predictions for the signals a Higgs would produce in these collider experiments. This helps to guide searches for the Higgs and other undiscovered particles related to it. An exciting part of studying the very smallest objects we know of is that they can play an important role in the behaviour of the universe over astronomical distances. Measurements in astronomy find that most of the matter in the universe does not give off light, and has very different properties than the matter we know of. A second major topic of my research is to investigate the nature of this dark matter, and to come up with ways to find it with telescopes and in the laboratory.