New Pathways Connecting Theory and Experiment

About This Grant

This award funds the research activities of Professors Hitoshi Murayama and Lawrence J. Hall at University of California, Berkeley. Major advances are expected in understanding the laws of physics never probed before, with new data coming from the Large Hadron Collider in Europe (which is currently the highest-energy colliding beam facility in the world), from underground experiments in South Dakota, and from other laboratories around the world. Additional data is also expected from precision experiments at Fermilab (the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois), with additional insights coming from deepening connections to experiments in astrophysics and cosmology. Research in theory is needed to tie all of these results together into a coherent framework. In this project, Professors Murayama and Hall aim to uncover deep secrets that span the range from the smallest scales of particles and strings to the largest scales of the Universe. The scope of their research will include collider physics, dark matter, neutrinos, quark flavor, the phenomenology and theory of supersymmetry, observational cosmology, gravitational waves, strongly coupled quantum field theories, and the multiverse. It is also expected that new collaborations will emerge on these topics. Professors Murayama and Hall will also be active in public outreach and training the next generation of researchers as well as members of the general scientific workforce, thereby situating this work within the national interest. More technically, Professor Murayama will study non-perturbative dynamics of strongly coupled gauge theories, exploiting their exact solutions in the supersymmetric limit together with anomaly-mediated supersymmetry breaking. This method has allowed people in the community to test many ideas concerning non-perturbative physics, including axions, phase transitions, oblique confinement, etc. Professor Murayama will also build models of dark matter and axions covering different parameter sets relevant for experiments. Professor Hall will work on developing new models of flavor, both at the grand-unification and multi-TeV scales. These models will lead to new results for precision flavor physics experiments. Such results can also potentially address the strong CP problem without an axion. In addition, Professor Hall will incorporate the multiverse paradigm together with symmetries in order to understand the origins of flavor and neutrino mass. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.