High Energy / Nuclear Physics
High Energy Physics deals with the nature of the fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions. The past 50 years have witnessed tremendous progress in our understanding of these issues, and a remarkably simple and elegant picture, the so-called standard model, has emerged as a result of intensive experimental and theoretical investigations. Nevertheless, many basic questions remain to be answered.
Why does the universe contain so much more matter than antimatter? What is the origin of mass and electric charge? What is the purpose of the heavier "copies" of the quarks and the leptons that make up most of the matter in our universe? How did each of the four fundamental forces acquire their distinctive characteristics, and to what extent are these forces related?
Exploring these issues requires probing the structure of matter at extremely small distances, and therefore high energies. Consequently, experimental activity focuses on the use of high-energy accelerators to reach extreme conditions, and theoretical approaches lead to frontiers of modern mathematics in attempts to crystalize and unify understanding.
The Department has a long and distinguished history of research in the field of High Energy Physics, which continues to the present.
On the theoretical side, active areas include investigation of the foundations of Quantum Field Theories (Profs. Das, Hagen and Rajeev), the phenomenological application of theory to experiment (Profs. Orr and Rajeev), nonlinear integrable models (Prof. Das) and non-associative algebras (Prof. Okubo).).
On the experimental side, Department faculty currently participate in a broad range of major experimental endeavors that address such fundamental issues as:
The search for the origins of symmetries (and their violations) in nature; the possible existence of new particles such as Higgs bosons and supersymmetric partners of the known fundamental particles; studies of the properties of the heaviest quarks and bosons (top, bottom charm, W, and the Z); searches for dark matter; investigations of neutrino oscillations and neutrino mass; and the substructure of the nucleon.
Our experimental programs at hadron colliders include studies of the top quark, and W and Z bosons, and the search for Higgs boson and supersymetric particles at the CDF (Profs. Bodek and McFarland, and Drs. de Barbaro, Budd and Sakumoto) and the D0 (Profs. Demina, Ferbel , Garcia-Bellido and Slattery, and Drs. Ginther and Zielinski) experiments at the proton-antiproton collider at Fermilab; and at the CMS (Profs. Bodek, Demina, Garcia-Bellido, Melissinos and Slattery, and Drs. de Barbaro, Budd, Ginther and Zielinski) experiment at the proton-proton Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Studies of quark-gluon plasma as a model for conditions in the early universe have been conducted at the PHOBOS (Profs. Manly and Wolfs) experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL).
Our experimental programs at electron-positron colliders includes studies of the properties of the bottom and charm quakrs and properties of the tau lepton at the CLEO (Prof. Thorndike) experiment at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, and at the BES III (Prof. Thorndike) experiment at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing, China; investigation of physics possibilities at Next International Electron-Positron Linear Collider (ILC) (Profs. Manly and Orr); and the development of electron beams for future linear accelerators (Prof. Melissinos).
Our previous high energy neutrino experimental effort with the NuTeV (Profs. Bodek, and McFarland, and Drs. de Barbaro, Budd and Sakumoto) detector at Fermilab has shifted to lower energies, and is now focussed on investigation of neutrino quasielastic, inelastic and resonance production on nuclear targets with the MINERVA (Profs. Bodek, Manly, and McFarland, and Drs. de Barbaro, Budd and Sakumoto) detector at the NUMI beam at Fermilab. A complementary effort is the investigation of electron quasielastic, inelastic and resonance production on nuclear targets with the JUPITER (Profs. Bodek, Manly, and McFarland, and Drs. de Barbaro, Budd and Sakumoto) experiment at Hall C at the Jefferson Laboratory. These data provide a detailed understanding of neutrino-nucleon interactions for neutrino oscillations experiments. The Rochester neutrino group is involved in the construction of the near neutrino detector for the T2K neutrino oscillations experiment at the Japanese Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC).
Our experimental program in Particle Astrophysics includes searches for dark matter using liquid xenon detectors with the Zeplin detector (Prof. Ferbel, Schroeder and Wolfs) at the Boulby mine, and with the new proposed Large Underground Xenon (LUX) Experiment at the DUSEL underground Laboratory at Homestake; and searches for gravitational waves at high frequency with the LIGO (Prof. Melissinos) gravitational wave detector detector.
Our ongoing research in detector development includes scintillation, calorimetric and silicon detectors (Profs. Bodek, Demina, McFarland and Wolfs).
For research in nuclear physics click here.
