Research
pic courtesy: cds.cern.ch
Physics Beyond the Standard Model
Standard Model (SM) of particle physics describes the fundamental interactions between elementary particles. It has been proven enormously successful over the years, explaining many features of our nature that we observe in experiments. However, SM can not be the final theory as it suffers from a few major drawbacks.
Observations of non-zero neutrino mass, irrefutable evidence for the existence of dark matter, matter-antimatter asymmetry, fine tuning problems etc., require intervention of beyond standard model (BSM) physics. Assuming the scale of new physics (NP) to be within the experimentally accessible range, the goal for us is to look for solutions to these problems and use all the resources at our disposal to find any signatures of BSM at the fundamental frontiers, i.e., cosmic, intensity, and energy frontier. More about the frontiers below:
Frontier Physics:
Cosmic frontier: These experiments are trying to find out any deviations from the SM expectation from naturally occurring events in the Universe. Examples are Dark matter, dark energy probes such as CAST, XENON1T etc.
pic courtesy: DOE (USA)
Intensity frontier: These experiments use intense source of beams to look for rare processes in the SM. As a result, if there exists new physics, it would not be masked by large SM background. Examples are Belle, BaBar etc.
pic courtesy: KEK (JAPAN)
Energy frontier: The most well known example is of course the LHC collaboration at CERN. Using highly energetic beams, these experiments are looking for direct production of new physics particles.
pic courtesy: cds.cern
From a theoretical perspective, we either use a top-down/model dependent (e.g., supersymmetry) or bottom-up/model independent (e.g., effective field theories) approach to propose or explain new interesting results in these frontiers.
examples of models, pic courtesy: Tim Tait
examples of effective field theories, pic courtesy: Iain Stewart
My Research Interests:
In the recent past, I have worked on the following topics.
Cooling of stellar objects, e.g., Neutron Stars
Axion/Dark gauge bosons at the intensity and cosmic frontier,
Phase transition in the early Universe,
Applications of effective field theory (SCET, HQET, etc.) in Beyond Standard Model Physics,
Supersymmetry model building, dark matter, and phenomenology,
Collider Physics.
Selected Works:
Full list of my publications can be found here
Anomaly induced cooling of Neutron Stars: A Standard Model contribution, arXiV: 2306.15872
Ultra-relativistic bubbles from the simplest Higgs portal and their cosmological consequences, JHEP 10 (2022) 017
Heavy QCD axion in b->s transition: Enhanced limits and projections, Phys. Rev. D, 104 (2021) 5, 055036
Solar origin of the XENON1T excess without stellar cooling problem, Phys. Rev. D 102 (2020) 9, 095029
Topics in SCET for gravity: diff invariant Wilson lines and RPI, Phys. Rev. D 101 (2020) 6, 066019
Charting generalized supersoft supersymmetry, JHEP 05 (2018) 176
Neutrino mixing and RK anomaly in U(1)X models: a bottom-up approach, JHEP 03 (2017) 117
Chasing new physics in stacks of soft tracks, Phys. Rev. D (R) 94 (2016) 11, 111703
Higgs boson mass, neutrino mass and mixing and keV dark matter in U(1)R lepton number model, JHEP 01 (2014) 101