This award supports the research of Professor Herbert Neuberger, from Rutgers University. The recent experimental discovery of a new particle ("Higgs") at the Large Hadron Collider has firmly established a level of validity for the 50 years old theoretically constructed "Standard Model". Several theoretical concerns about the Higgs sector led many to develop theoretical alternatives involving new strong forces. While many of these new alternatives have been ruled out by the new discovery, several somewhat formal theoretical concerns remain. The award will support research on a reevaluation of the fundamental assumptions underlying the field theory that is the basis of the Standard Model, with the hope of tying together the observed Higgs sector to possible strong dynamics at higher energies, and will also study some other aspects of the Standard Model which never were under good theoretical control.
The main viewpoint of this work is to see how much flexibility there is in the restriction of imposing strict locality on the theory. Specifically, the question is whether it is mathematically possible to relax locality in such a manner that some of the above theoretical concerns would be eliminated. The Standard Model is classically conformal at high energies, and one wonders whether relaxing locality in a conformal theory can lead to a low energy theory that is non-conformal and local. This will be done by looking at simpler toy models in the hope that even simple mathematically well-defined systems could teach us something of ultimate value to the understanding Nature. The tools to be used will be computer simulation and expanding in a large number of colors.
