Particle Theory @ UC santa barbara
I lead the particle theory group at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I work alongside a constellation of amazing postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates. Our work is primarily supported by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation (via the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics). My publications can be found on INSPIRE or Google Scholar.
Particle physics seeks to understand the elementary constituents of matter, the forces that bind them, and the organizing principles that unite them. Recent decades have seen tremendous progress towards these goals, culminating in the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the completion of the Standard Model. The broad objective of my research is to reveal the fundamental physics underlying the Standard Model by pioneering new approaches to some of the biggest open questions: the origin of mass, the unification of forces, the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and the patterns of Standard Model parameters, among many others. I’ve pursued this program using tools from across the spectrum of theoretical physics, from formal methods of quantum field theory to cosmology and collider phenomenology. My research has leveraged the Higgs boson as a tool for new discoveries, motivated the next generation of colliders, and transformed the landscape of physics beyond the Standard Model by discovering new theories that explain the breaking of electroweak symmetry.
Particle theory in the 21st century makes contact with a host of other fields, including condensed matter physics; atomic, molecular, and optical physics; nuclear physics; astrophysics; cosmology; mathematics; and computer science. In recent years, my group's research has expanded to include the mathematical field of optimal transport, machine learning for physics, and physics for machine learning.
From 2020-2022 I was a co-convener of the Theory Frontier in the APS DPF Snowmass process, the decadal survey of particle physics; our work resulted in an official recommendation to increase DOE particle theory funding by 30%. I currently lead the Particle Theory Initiative at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, where we work to strengthen connections both between the different facets of particle physics and with the many other fields that particle physics intersects.
