Particle Theory and Cosmology Beyond the Standard Model

This award funds the research activities of Professors Zackaria Chacko, Anson Hook, and Raman Sundrum at the University of Maryland, College Park. The principal investigators will develop and study new theories that extend the standard model of particle physics and cosmology, with three primary goals in mind. The first is to provide well-founded theoretical templates to guide experiments in fundamental physics. These range from the CERN Large Hadron Collider and future particle colliders capable of creating exotic new particles, to high-precision studies of the properties of known particles such as the neutrino and Higgs boson, to frontline cosmological, astrophysical, and gravitational wave probes of the universe's earliest phases and of its mysterious dark matter. The second goal is to delve further into theory at the intersection of quantum mechanics, relativity, and gravitation, in search of new fundamental principles. The third goal is to promote teaching, training, and learning among students and postdoctoral researchers, and to share the excitement of the research with the broader community. The fundamental laws of nature lie at the root of all the natural sciences, and therefore, the cutting-edge research in this project and the broad dissemination of its findings will benefit the national interest and our modern civilization. More technically, the principal investigators will study new aspects of particle compositeness, including its fusion with supersymmetry and ability to address the electroweak and flavor hierarchy puzzles in the visible sector, as well as compositeness phenomenology of dark sectors, including possible incarnations of dark matter as analogs of atoms or hadrons. Energy-correlator methods will be developed to provide well-defined experimental observables of particle compositeness at colliders. New possible interactions of dark matter with dark radiation will be studied to help explain current cosmological anomalies and to predict upcoming experiments. Non-Gaussianities in primordial cosmological correlators will be studied to probe particle physics at the highest energies of cosmic inflation, working towards templates for experimental probes of grand unification and string theory. Variants of the mechanism of cosmic inflation will be studied, in particular Warm Inflation, to probe whether the non-uniformities of the current universe originated primarily from quantum or thermal fluctuations. New studies within quantum field theory will be conducted to assess the impact of discrete symmetries on naturalness, to seek new bound states involving magnetic monopoles, and to elucidate the holographic grammar underlying inflationary correlations. 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.