This award funds the LHC Theory Initiative, a competitive national fellowship program supporting the training of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in theoretical particle physics.
After nearly twenty years of planning and construction, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is now the highest-energy particle collider in the world. Data from the LHC is likely to lead to nothing less than a new "Standard Model" of particle physics, describing the building blocks of matter and their interactions at an even higher energy scale. This award will fund competitive graduate student and postdoctoral fellowships aimed at young theorists intent on interpreting the LHC data. Theoretical analysis provides an essential complement to the LHC experimental program, and this award will help ensure that the United States has the young theorists it needs to gain full benefit from the investment it had made in the LHC experimental facility.
This project is also envisioned to have significant broader impacts. In particular, it will train leaders of the next generation in this fundamental field of physics.
