RUI: Neutrino, Collider, and Dark Matter Phenomenology

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This RUI award funds the research activities of Professors James B. Dent and Joel W. Walker at Sam Houston State University.In their research, Professors Dent and Walker work to build bridges that connect advances in theoretical physics to experimental results in the areas of neutrino, collider, and dark-matter physics. Neutrinos are light, fast-moving particles produced in stellar environment via cosmic radiation and in nuclear decay processes, but they interact so weakly that many of their properties remain mysterious. At colliders, and especially now at the Large Hadron Collider, familiar particles impact with sufficient ferocity to recreate conditions of the early universe. Through its gravitational effects, dark matter is known to represent a quarter of the energy of the universe, but we have never directly observed the particle or particles of which this dark matter is made. Connecting each of these efforts is a desire to better understand the fundamental building blocks of matter and their interactions. Thus, research in this area advances the national interest by fostering the progress of basic science. Professors Dent and Walker will develop new physical models, propose improved search strategies, contribute software tools, and interpret constraints imposed by new observations. Significant broader impacts are realized through the close supervision of undergraduate research students at Sam Houston State University, a primarily undergraduate institution that serves a diverse student population. Professors Dent and Walker are dedicated to providing an environment that develops the analytical, numerical, and creative skills of their students through participation in journal publications and conference presentations and by creating a foundation for graduates to thrive in doctoral programs at major research universities.More specifically, the process of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (observed for the first time in 2017) will be used to place limits on physics beyond the Standard Model, including short-baseline oscillations induced by a massive sterile neutrino, and on non-standard interactions in the light-mediator and effective field theory contexts. In support of these goals, Professors Dent and Walker serve as theory advisors with the Mitchell Institute Neutrino Experiment at Reactor (MINER) collaboration, contributing analysis and interpretation. At the Large Hadron Collider, since new physics beyond the Standard Model is not yet manifest in obvious ways, the community must shift attention to processes which may be kinematically concealed, which require large statistics for discrimination, or which are intrinsically rare. This proposal advances that worldwide effort via direct analysis and by contributing public software and algorithmic tools, including the development of a new scale-invariant jet-clustering algorithm. Toward the goal of discerning the nature of dark matter, Professors Dent and Walker will investigate the capacity for current and future attempts at direct detection to characterize dark-matter properties such as mass, spin, and non-gravitational interactions, including the effects of an irreducible neutrino background. This study will also extend to more general dark-sector frameworks, including the wide variety of experiments designed to search for such particles, especially in the sub-GeV mass range.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.