Theoretical High Energy Physics Research

The emphasis of theoretical high energy physics is to determine the fundamental laws of nature. Among the questions being investigated by the theorists at the University of Cincinnati are non-perturbative aspects of quantum field theory, electroweak symmetry breaking and fermion mass generation, flavor physics, model building, various aspects of unification of fundamental forces, supersymmetric gauge theories, superstring theory, classical and quantum gravity, particle astrophysics, and theories of dark matter and dark energy.

Philip Argyres is working on the dynamics of strongly-interacting gauge theories with various amounts of supersymmetry and in various dimensions. He is exploring the strong-weak coupling dualities exhibited by these theories and the role that higher-dimensional gauge theories and string theory plays in deriving and organizing the low-energy solutions of gauge theories.  You can find more information on his website.

Joachim Brod is currently working on flavor and CP violation, new physics in the Higgs sector, and dark matter physics. His recent work includes a comprehensive effective theory framework for dark matter direct detection, constraints on new sources of CP violation in the Higgs sector using measurements of electric dipole moments and collider data, as well as precision predictions of flavored meson decays in and beyond the standard model. He specializes in the calculation of multi-loop radiative corrections in effective field theories using computer algebra.

Alex Kagan is interested in B physics. Currently he is trying to catalogue rare hadronic exclusive B decays which are predicted to have negligible direct CP violation in the standard model in the absence of soft final state interactions, but for which large new physics induced CP asymmetries are possible. He is also investigating what type of experimental tests would lead to bounds on the standard model CP asymmetries in these modes. He is also working on B to S + G decays. He is also interested in bosonic technicolor.

Rohana Wijewardhana is working on various aspects of dynamical mass generation. He is interested in building models of mass generation employing gauge theories with infrared stable fixed points, and analyzing such gauge theories using gauge/gravity duality. His other research interests include the study of field theories in lower dimensions, black hole physics and cosmology.

Jure Zupan is interested in phenomenological aspects of high energy theory: dark matter direct and indirect experiments, the production of dark matter at colliders, in particular the CERN LHC, flavor physics including new precision frontier with the upcoming experiments Belle 2 and SuperB, the calculation of higher order corrections to dark matter production, effective field theories.  You can find more information on his website.

Paul Esposito has interests in many aspects of general relativity and differential geometry. Of current concern are the properties of black holes in 2+1 and 3+1 dimensions, and the generalizations of these solutions in string theory. He has also been working on the generation of solutions to the Einstein-Maxwell equations and the analysis of their physical meaning with special interest to applications in string theory.

Richard Gass is interested in general relativity and computational physics. Of current concern are the evaporation of two-dimensional black holes, the classification of space-times using scalar invariants and holographic Josephson junctions.

Peter Suranyi (Emeritus) is currently working on aspects of dynamical symmetry breaking in gauge/gravity duality theories. His other research interest is the study of solutions of Einstein-Lovelock gravity theory in a variety of topologies. In particular, he is working on the thermodynamics and dynamical stability of those solutions.

Cenalo Vaz works in the areas of classical and quantum gravity. He is currently working on quantum gravitational collapse, the quantum properties of black holes and naked singularities, black hole thermodynamics and issues in early universe cosmology. He is interested in theories of emergent gravity.

For more information about high energy theory research at UC, including links to seminar listings and individual webpages, please visit http://sites.google.com/site/hepthuc/home.

The current list of seminars can be found here.