High Energy Physics deals with the nature of the fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions. The past 50 years have witnessed tremendous progress in our understanding of these issues, and a remarkably simple and elegant picture, the so-called standard model, has emerged as a result of intensive experimental and theoretical investigations. Nevertheless, many basic questions remain to be answered. Why does the universe contain so much more matter than antimatter? What is the origin of mass and electric charge? What is the purpose of the heavier "copies" of the quarks and the leptons that make up most of the matter in our universe? How did each of the four fundamental forces acquire their distinctive characteristics, and to what extent are these forces related? Exploring these issues requires probing the structure of matter at extremely small distances, and therefore high energies. Consequently, experimental activity focuses on the use of high-energy accelerators to reach extreme conditions, and theoretical approaches lead to frontiers of modern mathematics in attempts to crystalize and unify understanding.
The Department has a long and distinguished history of research in the field of High Energy Physics, which continues to the present. On the experimental side, Department faculty currently participate in a broad range of major experimental endeavors that address such fundamental issues as the search for the origins of symmetries (and their violations) in nature, the possible existence of new particles such as Higgs bosons and supersymmetric partners of the known fundamental particles, on studies of the properties of the heaviest quarks and bosons (top and bottom, W, and the Z), searches for gravitational waves, investigations of neutrino oscillations and neutrino mass, and the substructure of the nucleon.
Our experiments include, at Fermilab, CDF (Profs. Bodek and McFarland, and Drs. de Barbaro, Budd and Sakumoto), E706 (Profs. Ferbel and Slattery, and Drs. Ginther and Zielinski), D0 (Profs. Demina, Ferbel and Slattery, and Drs. Ginther and Zielinski), NuTeV and Neutrino Oscillations (Profs. Bodek, and McFarland, and Drs. de Barbaro, Budd and Sakumoto), and the development of electron beams for future accelerators (Prof. Melissinos); at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, CLEO (Prof. Thorndike); at LIGO (Prof. Melissinos); and at CERN, CMS (Profs. Bodek, Demina and Slattery, and Drs. de Barbaro, Budd and Ginther). At Brookhaven, the PHOBOS collaboration (Profs. Manly and Wolfs) studies the quark-gluon plasma as a model for conditions in the early universe.
Additional efforts include a comparison of low energy neutrino and electron nucleon scattering (Profs. Bodek, Manly, and McFarland, and Drs. de Barbaro, Budd and Sakumoto) at Jefferson Laboratory JUPITER, Fermilab (NUMI/MINERVA) and the Japanese Hadron facility (J-PARC), investigation of physics possibilities at Electron-Positron Linear Colliders NLC (Profs. Manly and Orr), detector development including scintillation, calorimetric and silicon detectors (Profs. Bodek, Demina and McFarland, and Wolfs, and Drs. de Barbaro, Budd, Ginther and Sakumoto), and searches for Dark Matter (Prof. Ferbel, Schroeder and Wolfs).
On the theoretical side, active areas include investigation of the foundations of Quantum Field Theories (Profs. Das, Hagen and Rajeev), the phenomenological application of theory to experiment (Profs. Orr and Rajeev), nonlinear integrable models (Prof. Das) and non-associative algebras (Prof. Okubo).
Faculty
 Arie Bodek |
 Howard S. Budd |
 Ashok Das |
 Pawel de Barbaro |
 Regina Demina |
 Thomas Ferbel |
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Aran Garcia-Bellido |
 George Ginther |
 C. Richard Hagen |
 Steven L. Manly |
 Kevin S. McFarland |
 Adrian C. Melissinos |
 Susumu Okubo |
 Lynne H. Orr |
 Sarada G. Rajeev |
 Willis K. Sakumoto |
 Wolf-Udo Schroeder |
 Paul F. Slattery |
 Edward H. Thorndike |
 Frank L. H. Wolfs |
 Marek A. Zielinski |
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