Category: Particle Physics

After a day and a half of intense discussions and exchanges of information, the Intensity Frontier workshop meeting is coming to an end today. I already mentioned on Wednesday that particle physicists are currently summarizing their efforts as roughly divided into three research directions:

• The Energy Frontier: Try to make new heavy particles or other high-energy phenomena using very high-energy high-collision-rate accelerators (such as the Large Hadron Collider)
• The Cosmic Frontier: Let the Universe itself, through its natural particle production mechanisms, teach us something (through properties of “dark energy” or dark matter or through cosmic rays, etc.)
• The Intensity Frontier: Search for rare new phenomena or difficult-to-produce new particles using medium-energy ultra-high-collision-rate accelerators, or some other low-energy ultra-high-rate mechanism.

Each frontier has its advantages; the energy frontier probes new particles and forces very directly, allowing for detailed study, whereas the intensity frontier is indirectly sensitive to much higher energies and/or much weaker forces, though it often provides fewer details. Meanwhile, at the cosmic frontier we rely purely upon what the universe has to offer, which has the obvious benefit that what the universe provides comes for free, and the disadvantage that what it provides is limited and out of our control. (more…)

Yesterday I spent the day at Stony Brook, one of the branches of the State University of New York (SUNY), which has a long and distinguished history, and a bright future, in high-energy physics and related fields.   It is the home of the C.N.Yang Institute and the Simons Center.  My main task was to deliver a colloquium on the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] (roughly the same talk I gave at Harvard recently) but the real pleasure of the visit (at least for me) was catching up with what some of my colleagues who work there, or who were themselves visiting there, have been doing recently.

One thing I’ve not talked about yet on this website — mainly because it is more technical than LHC physics — is that a lot of progress is being made right now understanding the fundamentals of my entire research area.  I refer here to what is known as “quantum field theory” [QFT for short].  It’s not a “theory” in the colloquial sense of “hunch” or “conjecture”, where you imagine someone saying “my theory is that it was the butler’s fault”.  This is a second meaning, very common in science, of the word “theory”: a mathematical framework for scientific calculations, and a conceptual framework that goes along with it. (more…)