Department of Physics at the U of I

High Energy Physics

9 Cell

What is High Energy Physics?

In high energy physics we seek to understand the nature of space and time, the characteristics of the forces governing the interactions of matter and energy, and the origins of the properties of the elementary particles. Modern theories of particle physics purport to explain the origin of mass, and hope to unify the descriptions of all the forces, including gravity. With the discovery that "normal" matter constitutes only 4% of the total energy in the universe, the study of dark matter and dark energy has attracted great interest.

What Are We Doing With High Energy Physics at the U of I?

Our group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is active on many fronts. The theorists study string theory and duality, electroweak symmetry breaking and grand unification, and lattice QCD and flavor physics.

In the experimental program our running experiments are CDF-II and CLEO-c, with ATLAS at the Large Hadron Collider turning on soon. Our astrophysics wing is working on the Dark Energy Survey and in the longer term on LSST. For the even more distant future we are involved in Linear Collider R&D.

Our CDF group is active in top physics, gauge boson physics, flavor physics with bottom hadrons, and the search for the Higgs Boson. We still have a chance to find the Higgs at the Tevatron if it is in the right mass range. But if we don't find it there, ATLAS is just around the corner!

CLEO-c measures many charmed particle properties more than an order of magnitude better than any competitors, providing not only fundamental tests of theory (e.g., leptonic decay rates), but also measurements needed for the precise interpretation of B-factory data.

Focus continues to produce results, including the first observation of interference in D + semileptonic decay.

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) will study dark matter and dark energy through their effect on the acceleration of the universe and on the history of structure formation. We are building a red sensitive and very fast 520 Megapixel camera at the Blanco 4-meter telescope in the Chilean Andes.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will provide digital imaging of faint astronomical objects across half of the sky every three days, opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move on rapid timescales: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids, and distant Kuiper Belt Objects. The superb images from the LSST will also be used to measure the distortions in remote galaxy shapes produced by lumps of dark matter, providing multiple tests of the mysterious dark energy.

Faculty

El-Khadra, Aida X Professor 467 Loomis Laboratory 217.333.5026	Errede, Deborah M Research Associate Professor 417 Loomis Laboratory 217.333.2490
Errede, Steven M Professor 435 Loomis Laboratory 217.333.0074	Fields, Brian D Professor of Physics (0%) Associate Professor of Astronomy 216 Astronomy Building 217.333.5529
Gollin, George D Professor 437D Loomis Laboratory 217.333.4451	Katz, Sheldon Professor of Physics (0%) Chair and Professor of Mathematics 273 Altgeld Hall 217.265.6258
Leigh, Rob Professor 431 Loomis Laboratory 217.265.0314	Liss, Tony M Professor 415 Loomis Laboratory 217.244.2101
Neubauer, Mark Assistant Professor 411 Loomis Laboratory 217.244.3913	Pitts, Kevin T Professor 231 Loomis Laboratory 217.333.3946
Selen, Mats A Professor 433 Loomis Laboratory 217.333.4173	Stack, John D Professor 437B Loomis Laboratory 217.333.4357
Stelzer, Timothy J 307 Loomis Laboratory 217.265.0758	Thaler, Jon Professor 427 Loomis Laboratory 217.333.8174
Willenbrock, Scott S Professor 437C Loomis Laboratory 217.333.4392	Wiss, James E Professor 413 Loomis Laboratory 217.333.4873
16 people found