Theoretical Physics

This award funds the research activities of Professors Maria C. Gonzalez-Garcia, Patrick Meade, Leonardo Rastelli, Martin Rocek, Robert Shrock, George Sterman and Alexander Zamolodchikov at Stony Brook University. Physics is constantly evolving as new techniques and capabilities are developed to understand the natural world. This award supports research in a broad but deeply related set of topics in theoretical physics. Engagement at each of these frontiers of knowledge serves the national interest by advancing fundamental scientific progress within the United States. Investigations will include the analysis of high-energy collisions of elementary particles, which probe the fundamental laws upon which the material universe is based, and proposals for new experiments involving elementary particles and atomic nuclei. These efforts will complement studies of the deep mysteries of gravity, space, and time, and the possibility that all of the known forces in nature are related, unifying gravity itself with the forces that are seen in electrical phenomena, in radioactivity, and in nuclear physics. The theoretical methods developed in quantum field theory have also been found to have exciting applications to the properties of solids and to turbulence in fluids. This research, by advancing our knowledge of the laws of nature and by contributing to a better understanding of the physical universe, has significant broader impacts and implications for our worldview. Indeed, many of the topics under study by these faculty members --- including neutrinos, the Higgs boson, black holes, and strings --- are frequently discussed beyond academia. The research to be carried out under this award will also serve in the training of graduate students and the mentoring of postdoctoral fellows at the highest level. The faculty associated with this grant conduct their research with graduate students, and share their experience and expertise with undergraduates and community members, in and beyond the classroom. Individual members will also continue their own outreach activities, which have included successful traditions in high-school research mentoring and in the organization of science playwriting competitions. At the technical level, this award will support research over a wide range of theoretical physics, largely based on quantum field theory, phenomenological analysis of ongoing and planned experimental data, statistical mechanics, and string theory. Recent years have seen a strengthening engagement of theory and experiment in particle physics, synthesizing data from the Large Hadron Collider, from neutrino observatories, from cosmic-ray satellites, and now from gravitational-wave detectors. These new sources of information concerning our universe enable theorists to test long-standing ideas against evolving data, and to develop new theoretical methods to guide experiment. Understanding the extraordinary successes of the Standard Model of particle physics and how it is embedded in a still more fundamental theory will require the development of new precision techniques in perturbative and nonperturbative field theory. New approaches for the analysis of existing data and in plannning experiments on flavor quantum numbers and neutrino masses are under study. At the same time, novel applications of quantum field theory and string theory, including theory duality, conformal symmetries. and integrability properties have been developed in and beyond particle physics, opening unexpected avenues of research into condensed-matter physics, statistical mechanics, and pure mathematics. As active participants in these historic developments, the senior personnel associated with this award will continue to develop their work in quantum field theories with and without supersymmetry, in high-energy collider phenomenology, in model building, in quantum chromodynamics, in neutrinos, in astroparticle physics, in applications of gauge-gravity duality, in conformal field theory, in the concept of theory space, in extensions of the Standard Model, in electroweak symmetry breaking, in superstrings, and in the geometry of supersymmetric gauge theories. This research will also help train a new generation of theorists at the postdoctoral and graduate levels. 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.