Grant: Subatomic Physics Envelope - Individual

The goal of particle physics is to understand the fundamental particles and their interactions. We currently have a model, the standard model, that works remarkably well in describing all known elementary particles and their interactions. Yet we know that it can't be the final theory because of both theoretical inconsistencies in the standard model and the observation of phenomena that it cannot explain such as the existence of dark matter that makes up roughly 85% of the matter in the universe. My research focuses on new theories of particle physics that attempt to address these problems. I work in phenomenology which makes predictions based on theoretical models that can be tested by experiment and constructs theoretical models to explain experimental results. It is an exciting time to be working in this field with many experiments collecting data and more on the horizon. The physics community is anticipating new results that might give hints of physics beyond the standard model and and in fact some recent results have given tantalizing hints. Comparing theoretical predictions to a broad range of experiments gives a more complete picture than just one measurement. There is a significant Canadian participation in many forefront experiments and Canada also hosts world leading facilities such as SNOLAB. This investment in experiments is maximized by the symbiosis between theory and experiment by theorists making experimentally testable predictions, suggesting new measurements and confronting new experimental results. This is the focus of my research, to construct models that can explain new experimental observations, to make detailed predictions of experimental signals of models and to develop strategies that experimentalists can use to find these signals. This interplay between theory and experiment is crucial to making advances in our understanding of the fundamental interactions. One focus of my research is models of Dark Matter and Beyond the Standard Model physics and predictions that can be constrained by experiment to hone in on a viable model of dark matter. My continuing research studies BSM models of dark matter and how they can be tested by experiments, eg. ATLAS at the Large Hadron Collider and DEAP located in SNOLAB. The second focus is the study of a class of strongly interacting particles known as hadrons. There are many experiments running worldwide studying hadrons. Some hadrons are considered "conventional" as they can be understood by conventional models but there are many others that don't fit in this picture and are considered to be "exotic". I am calculating the properties of conventional states to try to identify their spectroscopic assignment and to help distinguish between conventional and exotic hadrons. I am also working on models to understand the nature of newly discovered exotic hadrons.