New Discoveries from Colliders and Cosmology

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My research deals with the elementary building blocks of nature. I perform calculations with the goal of figuring out what these fundamental constituents could be and how they interact with each other. The results of these calculations help to guide experimental efforts to discover and probe what we are made of at an ever more detailed level. By combining experimental measurements and theoretical calculations, we hope to understand the Universe at its most basic level. The main topic of my research is investigating why the weak force is so much weaker than the strong force or electromagnetism. Our best explanation for this relies on a particle called the Higgs boson. Recently, a new particle with the right properties to be the Higgs has been discovered at the Large Hadron Collider~(LHC) experiment. An important part of my research is to interpret data from the LHC to try to figure out whether the new particle is the Higgs and if there might be other new particles to be discovered. A second important topic of my research is connecting what we know about elementary particles to the structure of the Universe over astronomical scales. A specific puzzle that I investigate is why there is more matter than antimatter. On the Earth and also as far as we can observe in astronomy, the Universe consists almost entirely of matter. However, our description of elementary particles treats matter and antimatter in nearly the same way, and cannot account for the excess of matter. In my research I look at how certain types of new particles might help to generate the extra matter.