The Theoretical High Energy Physics group (HEP) at Los Alamos National Laboratory is active in a number of diverse areas of research. Their primary areas of interest are in physics beyond the Standard Model, cosmology, dark matter, lattice quantum chromodynamics, neutrinos, the fundamentals of quantum field theory and gravity, and particle astrophysics.
Generally the questions pursued by this group relate to deep mysteries in our understanding of Nature at the boundaries of the Standard Model and the grammar we use to describe it - quantum field theory and General Relativity.
- What is dark matter and dark energy and what are their physical properties? How do they interact with other fundamental particles? Are they related? Is dark matter a weakly-interacting particle or, like an axion, significantly more weakly interacting?
- What is dark energy?
What new particles exist at the TeV scale and what do they tell us about electroweak symmetry breaking and the electroweak hierarchy problem? Is there a hierarchy problem? Are there new physical principles at the TeV scale? - Is the Higgs boson a fundamental particle or composite, like a pion?
- What is the final state of complete gravitational collapse? What happens at the event horizon?
- How did the asymmetry between matter and anti-matter arise?
- How are high energy particle jets and ultra high energy cosmic rays produced?
- How do neutrinos acquire mass?
- Do new particles and/or dark matter interact with neutrinos? With the Higgs boson?
- How do we characterize new physics and develop strategies to discover it? Where should we look?
- How did the universe begin? What is its large scale structure and evolution?
- How can gravity be unified with quantum mechanics and the Standard Model?
Current staff members
Tanmoy Bhattacharya tanmoy at lanl.gov [SPIRES]
Alex Friedland friedland at lanl.gov [SPIRES]
Michael Graesser graesser at lanl.gov [SPIRES]
Rajan Gupta rajan at lanl.gov [SPIRES]
Emil Mottola emil at lanl.gov [SPIRES]
Michael Warren msw at lanl.gov [SPIRES]
Current post-docs are:
J.J. Cherry jcherry at lanl.gov [SPIRES]
Jinrui Huang jinruih at lanl.gov [SPIRES]
Tuhin S. Roy tuhin at lanl.gov [SPIRES]
Boram Yoon boram at lanl. gov [SPIRES]
Recent post-docs include: Haiyu Duan (UNM, faculty), Leanne Duffy (Los Alamos, staff scientist), Maurizio Giannotti (Barry U., faculty), Jim Jenkins (Los Alamos, staff scientist), Ian Shoemaker (CP3, post-doc), Lucca Vecchi (University of Maryland, postdoc).
Workshops
The HEP theory group holds annual workshops in Santa Fe. The themes of these workshops in the recent past reflected topical interest in dark matter, neutrinos and TeV-scale physics.