Grant: Subatomic Physics Envelope - Individual

To discover what the universe is made of and how it works is the challenge of particle physics. Our quest to understand nature has produced a remarkable understanding of the structure of matter, space and time, a product of decades of advances in theory and experiment. We have come now to a tremendously exciting time when experiments in the next few years promise to shed light on two fundamental mysteries: the existence of mass in our universe, and the surprising weakness of gravity compared to the other forces of nature. I study new theories of particle physics beyond our current Standard Model that address these twin mysteries. Whatever is responsible for the existence of mass and the phenomenal weakness of gravity, it must manifest experimentally at or below the Terascale, named for the TeV, or Teravolts, of energy that define it. Experimenters from around the world are even now exploring the lower reaches of the Terascale at the Fermilab Tevatron in the USA, and will be able to thoroughly cover it using the Large Hadron Collider when its construction at CERN in Geneva is completed in 2007. Further into the future, the International Linear Collider will offer an excellent opportunity to study the new physics with uniquely high precision. In order to understand the data that will come out of these current and future experiments, we need detailed theory calculations of both the expectations within the Standard Model and the potential signals in a variety of new models. The calculation of these expectations is the focus of my research.