Particle Physics Phenomenology: Understanding The Standard Model and Searching for What Lies Beyond

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The goal of particle physics is to understand the fundamental particles that make up everything in the universe and their interactions. We currently have a model called the standard model that works remarkably well in describing all the known elementary particles and their interactions. Yet we know that it can't be the final theory because of both theoretical inconsistencies in the standard model and the observation of phenomena that it cannot explain such as the existence of "dark matter" that makes up roughly 85% of the matter in the universe. My research focuses on new theories of particle physics that attempt to address these problems. I work in phenomenology which makes predictions based on theoretical models that can be tested by experiment and attempts to construct theoretical models to explain experimental results. It is a very exciting time to be working in this field. The Large Hadron Collider, operating at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, is probing the highest energy scales ever probed by accelerator based experiments so that the physics community is anticipating new results that might help us understand what lies beyond the standard model. There is also a constant stream of new results on dark matter ranging from accelerator based limits on dark matter production, direct detection experiments such as DEAP which is situated in SNOLab in Sudbury to astrophysical observations. There is an exciting interplay between constructing theories and confronting all these new experimental results. This requires detailed calculations of the expectations of these models. This is the focus of my research, to construct models that can explain these phenomena and new discoveries as they arise, to calculate the experimental signals predicted by these models and to develop strategies that experimentalists can use to find these signals. This interplay between theory and experiment is crucial to making advances in our understanding of the fundamental interactions.