University of Colorado HEP Faculty

Introduction

There are 13 faculty members in the University of Colorado High Energy Physics group. Their research interests include both Experimental and Theorectical High Energy Physics. The experimentalists work in collaboration with such groups as T2K, and CMS. They conduct research in such places as the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Fermi National Laboratory (FNAL) and JPARC. The major research areas of the theory group include string theory and quantum gravity, lattice QCD with an emphasis on issues associated with chiral symmetry, and beyond-standard model phenomenology and the origin of fermion masses.

John Cumalat

Professor Cumalat is an experimental elementary particle physicist. His research has involved the study of the strong interaction production mechanisms and the subsequent weak decay of charm and beauty states. Of particular interest is the quark mixing between the meson-antimeson states and establishing the spectra of charm baryon excited states. His research has been performed at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois in experiments E687 and FOCUS. During the past several years Professor Cumalat has served as a spokesman for these projects. Professor Cumalat is also involved in the development of new detectors and techniques to be used for elementary particle detection. In 2005, Professor Cumalat joined the CMS experiment at CERN where he is working on the forward pixel project. The Colorado group is involved in the commissioning of the forward pixel detector. Professor Cumalat can be reached at . See current Curriculum Vitae.

Senarath P. de Alwis

Professor de Alwis is a theoretical physicist whose main interests are in supersymmetry breaking, string theory and quantum gravity. In the last few years his focus has been on flux compactifications of string theory, their phenomenology and cosmology. In the last year he has worked mainly on different mechanisms for communicating supersymmetry breaking to the (TeV scale) observable sector and their possible implications for physics at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN Geneva. Professor de Alwis can be reached at . See current Curriculum Vitae.

Tom DeGrand

Professor Tom DeGrand is a theoretical physicist interested mostly in particle physics, specifically in the problem of quark confinement. Because quark confinement is a strong interaction phenomenon, conventional techniques such as perturbation theory cannot be applied to study it. Instead, he models the strong interactions using a supercomputer: a small region of space, hopefully larger than the volume of a typical bound state of quarks, is broken up into a lattice of points, quark and gluon fields are introduced on the sites and links of the lattice, and then they are allowed to interact. Examples of calculations that he has carried out are the predictions of the masses of bound states of quarks and gluons, of properties of the bound states such as decay amplitudes or other matrix elements, and of the behavior of quark matter at extreme temperatures, the quark-gluon plasma. Professor DeGrand can be reached at . See current Curriculum Vitae.

Oliver DeWolfe

Oliver DeWolfe is an assistant professor of theoretical particle physics. His research interests are in string theory and its application to phenomenology and cosmology. Professor DeWolfe received his undergraduate degree in physics and astronomy from Wesleyan University, and went to graduate school in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before coming to Boulder, he held postdoctoral research positions at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara and at Princeton Unversity. Professor DeWolfe can be reached at . See current Curriculum Vitae.

William T. Ford

Professor Bill Ford is an experimentalist in elementary particle physics. He currently collaborates in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment operating at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) laboratory in Switzerland, and in the BaBar experiment at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. The goals of this research are to elucidate the elementary interactions of quarks and leptons. The BaBar experiment has produced a rich variety of findings about B mesons, charm mesons and baryons, and tau leptons. It is designed particularly for the study of CP symmetry violation in B meson decays. The CMS experiment is exploring the new energy frontier opened up with the advent of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Professor Ford in collaboration with CU faculty colleagues and the group's undergraduate and graduate students and postdocs working in CMS investigate multi-lepton, and heavy-flavored multi-jet signatures for new particles, such as those predicted by the SUperSYmmetry theory. The group's physics interests at BaBar include a search for B meson decays to the relatively rare "charmless" final states. As members of the CLEO and BaBar collaborations they have discovered a number of new modes, and studied their CP symmetry violation properties. Professor Ford can be reached at . See current Curriculum Vitae.

Anna Hasenfratz

Professor Hasenfratz's is a high energy theoretical physicist. Her research interest is the study of the properties of quantum field theoretical models like QCD that is believed to describe the strong interactions of elementary particles or the so called Standard Model that describes weak interactions and predicts the existence of the WB1 and Z bosons and the yet undiscovered Higgs particle. The perturbative (small coupling) properties of these models can be studied with standard analytical technics (perturbation theory), but their strong coupling properties are non-perturbative and require a different treatment. Professor Hasenfratz's research concentrates on the non-perturbative properties quantum field theories, mainly QCD. Non-perturbative studies frequently require computer simulations but the emphasis is always on the physical picture and understanding of the physical phenomena. Professor Hasenfratz can be reached at . See current Curriculum Vitae.

K.T. Mahanthappa

Professor Mahanthappa's research interests are in the areas of inflation, supersymmetry, and unified theories.  Recent research is on the phenomenology of supersymmetric models including fermion (quarks, charged leptons and neutrinos) masses and mixing using GUTs. Professor Mahanthappa is the general girector for The Theoretical Advanced Study Institute in Elementary Particle Physics (TASI) held each summer at the University of Colorado. Professor Mahanthappa can be reached at . See current Curriculum Vitae.

Alysia Marino

Professor Marino has been studying neutrino oscillations for the past decade. In the past she has been involved with the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory and MINOS experiments. She is currently collaborating on the Tokai-to-Kamioka or T2K experiment. This project is producing a beam of neutrinos at the new J-PARC facility in Tokai, Japan. The neutrinos will travel 295 km across Japan to the Super-Kamiokande detector, where changes in the neutrino flavor composition of the beam will be probed. Prof. Marino can be reached at . More information can be found at at her website and the T2K-Colorado website.

James G. Smith

Professor Smith's research interests are in experimental high energy physics. As a member of the CLEO (Cornell) and BABAR (SLAC) collaborations, he was a primary author of several measurements of rare B meson decays. Among these was the first observation of the decays B --> pipi and B --> Kpi, which are crucial for CP violation measurements at B Factories, and the discovery of the decay B-->eta'K with a rate much larger than had been expected. We measured observed CP violation in the decay B-->eta'K0, making the first significant measurement of sin 2beta in this channel. Presently he is involved in the CMS experiment, running at the LHC. His primary interest is searching for SUSY with multipleptonic and b-quark-tagged events. Professor Smith can be reached at . See current Curriculum Vitae.

Kevin Stenson

Professor Stenson has been working in experimental high energy physics since 1995. During his first ten years of research he worked on experiments at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside of Chicago. He was part of the investigation of the properties of charm and beauty quarks as a member of the E791, FOCUS, and BTeV collaborations. In May, 2005 he joined the CU faculty and began working on the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experimen, located inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Professor Stenson works on track reconstruction and studies of the production and decay of b-hadrons. Professor Stenson can be reached at . More information is available from his Curriculum Vitae and web page.

Steve Wagner

Professor Steve Wagner joined the group in 2005, moving from a permanent staff position at SLAC. Steve was a postdoc in our group in the Mark II/SLC era and is a current BaBar collaborator. He is now playing a major role in the CMS experiment's tracking group and is also involved in research on the proposed International Linear Collider. Professor Wagner can be reached at See current Curriculum Vitae.

Eric D. Zimmerman

Professor Zimmerman joined the Colorado HEP group in 2001. His field of interest is experimental neutrino physics and currently centers on two neutrino experiments: E898 (BooNE) at Fermilab, and T2K at J-PARC. Prof. Zimmerman can be reached at . More information about the neutrino group can be found at http://hep-neutrino.colorado.edu.







Uriel Nauenberg (emeritus)

Emeritus Professor Nauenberg has made accurate tests of the Standard Model using polarized electron annihilations with positrons in the Z0 energy scale at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. These series of experiments have now come to an end. He is a member of the BaBar Collaboration that has studied the CP violation phenomena in the b quark sector. Prof. Nauenberg is also involved in the CMS experiment at CERN with an interest in the search for Supersymmetry. Long range he is involved in the study of the potential of a high energy electron-positron linear collider. The purpose of the collider would be to study the physics beyond the Standard Model. He is particularly interested in uncovering signals indicating the existence of supersymmetry. Prof. Nauenberg is carrying out detector development associated with a Linear Collider. He is working on the design of a special geometric arrangement of a scintillator/tungsten based electromagnetic/hadronic calorimeter with Silicon Photo Detectors as the readout medium. He is also working on the very forward calorimeter (BEAM-CAL) that will detect the presence of the "two-photon process", a serious background in the measurement of the masses of Supersymmetric particles. The work of his students in Supersymmetry can be found at SUSY . Professor Nauenberg can be reached at . See current Curriculum Vitae.