This award funds the research activities of Professors Christopher Carone, Joshua Erlich, and Marc Sher at the College of William and Mary.
A major goal of elementary particle physics is to understand the spectrum of elementary particles as well as their fundamental interactions. This is the central focus of the work of Professors Carone, Erlich, and Sher, who construct and study theories that address some of the most profound unsolved mysteries in particle physics. These theories often lead to testable predictions in experiments like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which was built in order to search for undiscovered particles and to study their properties. The LHC is best known for the discovery of the Higgs boson, a particle whose existence is related to the origin of the masses of the other known elementary particles. The LHC operates at the frontier of experimentally accessible energies. The theoretical work of Professors Carone, Erlich, and Sher is also relevant at lower-energy experiments, such as dark-matter searches, designed to explore the possibility of new particles with very weak interactions. Research in these areas advances the national interest by promoting the progress of science in one of its most fundamental directions: the discovery and understanding of new particles and new physical laws. In their research, Professors Carone, Erlich, and Sher will explore several new theories that are experimentally testable. These include theories in which the observed Higgs boson is accompanied by additional Higgs bosons, theories in which new, very weakly interacting particles are present in conjunction with dark matter, and theories which provide a new description of the nature of gravity. The project is also envisioned to have significant broader impacts: Professors Carone, Erlich, and Sher will provide critical training for both undergraduate and graduate students beginning research in a technical field, giving them skills that translate to the broader technical workforce. They will also continue presenting public lectures on their research results, giving interviews about new results to interested media, and promoting high-energy physics in the southeastern United States.
More technically, Professors Carone, Erlich, and Sher will study models in which a warped extra dimension is stabilized by two Higgs doublets. They will construct models in which a non-Abelian flavor symmetry leads to familons that play a role in solving the strong CP problem and allowing for successful multi-field inflation. They have recently demonstrated the existence of a composite graviton in a class of scalar theories, and they will extend this to similar theories with fermions and gauge fields. This may lend support to a new approach to the problem of quantum gravity. They will also study dark sectors, with exotic fields that have very weak couplings to Standard-Model particles, analyze the renormalization-group running of these couplings, consider how these sectors can be constrained by theoretically well-motivated ultraviolet boundary conditions, and study the phenomenological implications of the dark-sector particles.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
