New Pathways Connecting Theory and Experiment

该奖项资助加州大学伯克利分校村山仁教授和劳伦斯·霍尔教授的研究活动。随着大型强子对撞机的出现、观测宇宙学的进步以及地下实验的进展，现代高能物理学进入了一个数据丰富的时代。作为他们研究的一部分，村山教授和霍尔教授的目标是通过建立新的理论，制定他们的预测，并为实验提出新的想法来调查和创造理论与实验之间的关键联系。这项研究的目标是揭示从最小尺度的粒子和弦到最大尺度的宇宙的深层秘密，包括对撞机物理学、暗物质、中微子、夸克味和观测宇宙学。因此，这项研究符合国家利益，促进了美国基础科学的发展。预计这项研究还将产生更广泛的重大影响。村山教授和霍尔教授将培训研究生和本科生，这些学生将在研究上与他们合作，并将通过QuarkNet框架与高中教师及其学生接触。他们还将发表公开演讲，其中许多将被录下来并上传到YouTube上。最后，他们将继续在更广泛的粒子物理社区中发挥重要的领导作用。从技术上讲，村山教授资助的研究有两个主要组成部分。第一个是超越标准模型的物理学，特别是建立暗物质、暗能量、超对称和中微子的模型，并研究它们的现象学。相比之下，第二部分侧重于场论的形式方面，特别是其数学结构及其与其他物理领域的相关性。霍尔教授将研究几种不同的新观点，涉及重QCD轴子的可能性、后期再加热产生的可能的重力波、希格斯宇称的宇宙学含义以及中微子质量和味道的宇称恢复的含义。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award funds the research activities of Professors Hitoshi Murayama and Lawrence Hall at the University of California, Berkeley.With the advent of the Large Hadron Collider, advances in observational cosmology, and progress in underground experiments, modern high-energy physics has entered a data-rich era. As part of their research, Professors Murayama and Hall aim to investigate and create critical ties between theory and experiment by building new theories, working out their predictions, and proposing new ideas for experiments to test. This research is guided by the goal of uncovering deep secrets that span from the smallest scales of particles and strings to the largest scales of the Universe, including collider physics, dark matter, neutrinos, quark flavor, and observational cosmology. This research is therefore in the national interest, furthering the development of fundamental science within the United States. This research is also envisioned to have significant broader impacts. Professors Murayama and Hall will train graduate and undergraduate students who will collaborate with them on their research, and will also reach out to high-school teachers and their students through the QuarkNet framework. They will also give public lectures, many of which will be recorded and made available on YouTube. Finally, they will continue their significant leadership roles within the broader particle-physics community.More technically, Professor Murayama's funded research has two major components. The first is physics beyond the Standard Model, in particular building models of dark matter, dark energy, supersymmetry, and neutrinos, and studying their phenomenologies. By contrast, the second focuses on formal aspects of field theory, in particular its mathematical structure and its relevance to other areas of physics. Professor Hall will investigate several different new ideas concerning the possibility of a heavy QCD axion, possible gravity waves from late reheating, cosmological implications of Higgs parity, and implications of parity restoration for neutrino masses and flavor.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.