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.

Selected Works:

            Full list of my publications can be found here