Multidiscipline Approach to the UV Completion of the Standard Model: Astrophysics, Cosmology, and Collider Physics

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This award funds the research of Professor Luis Anchordoqui at CUNY Lehman College.After nearly twenty years of planning and construction, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is now the world's largest and most powerful particle collider. By colliding elementary particles against each other at high energies, physicists expect to learn about the fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions at higher energies and smaller distances than have ever been previously explored. Currently the most successful theory for explaining how these elementary particles interact at the highest possible energies is string theory. String theory has the advantage of not only explaining the existence of all of the elementary particles as different excitations of a fundamental string, but also explaining how gravity might be unified with the other, non-gravitational forces. In his research, Professor Anchordoqui aims to develop methods to search for and test some of the ideas coming from string theory at the LHC. As a consequence, research in this area advances the national interest by promoting the progress of science in one of its most fundamental directions: the discovery and understanding of new physical laws. This project is also envisioned to have significant broader impacts. Professor Anchordoqui will involve graduate students and postdocs in his research, and thereby provide critical training for junior physicists beginning research in this field. He also intends to give public lectures on his research results, and develop new course curricula based on results from the LHC.More technically, Professor Anchordoqui will consider extensions of the Standard Model based on open strings ending on D-branes, with gauge bosons emerging as strings attached to stacks of D-branes and with chiral matter emerging as strings stretching between intersecting D-branes. Assuming that the fundamental string mass scale is in the TeV range and the theory is weakly coupled, Professor Anchordoqui will develop a number of search strategies that would signal string physics at the LHC. These include a re-examination of the so-called "Green-Schwarz mechanism", a modification of an action functional of a quantum field theory involving higher gauge fields that makes a quantum anomaly of the original action functional disappear, as well as the study of the minimal left-right symmetric intersecting D-brane model. He also plans to investigate whether the (possible) discrepancy between observation and theoretical calculation of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon can be explained in the context of low-mass-scale string resonances. Professor Anchordoqui will also undertake a phenomenological analysis of inflationary potentials exhibiting S-duality. Professor Anchordoqui is also involved with the Pierre Auger Collaboration, searching for the origin and nature of the highest-energy cosmic rays and studying particle interactions at center-of-mass energies well beyond those attained at the LHC.