This award funds the research activities of Professor David Tucker-Smith at Williams College.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has already made enormous progress pushing forward the high energy frontier. During the coming years, the LHC will continue to probe some of the deepest mysteries in particle physics, including the origin of elementary particle masses and the nature of dark matter. In his research, Professor Tucker-Smith studies extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics, with an emphasis on understanding how these theories can be tested at the LHC. As part of this project, Professor Tucker-Smith will study models that address a surprising experimental development from the Tevatron at Fermilab --- measurements of an anomalously large forward-backward asymmetry in top-antitop production. He will also study the LHC phenomenology of theories with a particular type of new force carrier, theories incorporating new ideas for dark matter, and theories in which the Higgs sector, the part of the model responsible for generating the masses of the elementary particles, differs from that of the Standard Model.
This project will also have signficant broader impacts. Undergraduate involvement is a central part of the Professor Tucker-Smith's research program. Students will have the opportunity to engage in particle physics research, and through their work they will learn important ideas, methods, and results relating to particle phenomenology and to theoretical physics in general.
