This award funds the research activities of Professors Stojkovic, Kinney, and Wackeroth at the State University of New York, University at Buffalo. The goal of this research project is to make important progress in providing answers to key open questions at the frontier of of particle physics, cosmology and gravity research, and in doing so to go significantly beyond the current state of the art in the field. The PIs propose individual research programs with elements which will be executed jointly. New particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and envisioned successors are probing new physics at the energy frontier and are capable of providing answers to important questions about the structure and history of the universe. On the other hand, cosmology provides a unique laboratory to study questions in physics inaccessible to traditional particle physics methods, and forms a valuable complement to accelerators. Our current understanding of the fundamental problems about the origin, evolution and future of our universe is still in its infancy, and a synthesis of many independent lines of evidence will be necessary to point the way to explanations. This project reflects that synergy, and promises to make significant progress in connecting high-precision cosmological and accelerator data to fundamental questions such as the origin and evolution of the universe, the unification of gravitation with quantum mechanics, the role of the vacuum in the structure of space and time. In addition the PIs will continue with their very active and successful presentation of the latest scientific results to a wide public in the form of public talks and various outreach activities. These will include The Science Exploration Day, Physics Open House, and Family Day. Kinney (with active participation of Stojkovic and Wackeroth) will continue organizing Science and Art Cabaret} - a unique mix of cutting-edge science and technology with art, music, poetry, and performance, and the At UB Symposium, a new interdisciplinary lecture series with a prototype event being held in 2013.
Stojkovic's research will span topics within his expertise from particle physics to cosmology. Part of his research will be focused to the LHC physics, in particular on further development of a comprehensive LHC event generator BlackMax which is extensively used by ATLAS and CMS in search for exotic physics, and understanding implications of the recent Higgs discovery on gravity and cosmology (in collaboration with Wackeroth). Part of his research will be dedicated to cosmology, in particular to studying predictions of a recently proposed class of inflationary models (in collaboration with Kinney), as well as studying new puzzling patterns in quasar light curves which seem to be closely related to the quasars' redshifts. The main goal of Kinney's research is to make quantitative connections between new observational data and detailed properties of the early universe to address fundamental questions such as: What is the energy scale of cosmological inflation? What is the form of the leading-order operator in the inflationary potential? Is the inflationary Lagrangian consistent with a simple canonical field theory? Is there evidence for quantum gravity effects, for example a Planck-scale cutoff in quantum modes? Can we explain CMB anomalies, such as the hemispherical asymmetry observed by Planck? Are there viable alternatives to inflation? What properties do they have? Wackeroth will concentrate on the precision electroweak (EW) physics, in particular on corrections to W and Z boson production in hadronic collisions, improving predictions for H,W, Z production in association with heavy quarks, and NLO EW corrections to triple EW gauge boson production with non-standard couplings. This work will be directly relevant to analysis of upcoming LHC data.
