• Home

Faculty Members:

• John Cumalat
• Senarath de Alwis
• Tom Degrand
• Oliver DeWolfe
• William Ford
• Anna Hasenfratz
• K.T. Mahanthappa
• Uriel Nauenberg
• James Smith
• Kevin Stenson
• Steve Wagner
• Eric Zimmerman

Local Links:

• Experimental Group
• Theoretical Group
• Computing Group
• Faculty
• Post-Docs
• Graduate Students
• Support Staff
• News and Information

Remote Physics Links:

• BooNE
• BaBar
• CMS
• US CMS
• FOCUS
• ILC
• TASI

University Links:

• CU Physics
• CU Home Page

Introduction

There are 12 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 BaBar, Internation Linear Collider, and Compact Muon Solenoid. They conduct research in such places as the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Fermi National Laboratory (FNAL) and the Stanford Linear Accelerator. 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 John 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) currently being built at CERN Geneva. Professor Senarath 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 Tom 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 Oliver 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 BaBar experiment operating at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. The goals of this research are to elucidate the elementary interactions of quarks and leptons. The storage ring at SLAC provides colliding beams of electrons and positrons. The annihilation energy produces particles that are detected in large, multilayered systems of tracking and energy conversion devices to produce a record of each event. The records tell us about the production and decay mechanisms which we compare with models derived from the elementary force laws. The BaBar experiment is producing a rich variety of findings about B mesons, charm mesons and baryons, and tau leptons. It is designed particularly for the study CP symmetry violation in B meson decays. Professor Ford's group detector efforts have centered mainly on tracking devices: vertex drift chambers for the Mark II experiment at SLAC, a large central drift chamber system that was planned for SSC, and the main tracking chamber for BaBar. Physics interests include weak interaction properties as measured by lifetimes, branching fractions, and decay dynamics of weakly decaying particles. 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 Anna 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 K.T. Mahanthappa can be reached at . See current Curriculum Vitae.

Uriel Nauenberg

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 is studying the CP violation phenomena in the b quark sector. Since the BaBar experiment is expected to continue another two years, Prof. Nauenberg is beginning to shift his work towards the CMS experiment at CERN where his group will collaborate on the forward pixel detectors and his interest will be 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. Professor Uriel Nauenberg can be reached at . See current Curriculum Vitae.

James Smith

Professor Smith's research interests are in experimental high energy physics. As a member of the CLEO collaboration (Cornell), 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. Presently he is involved in the BaBar experiment, running at the SLAC B-Factory PEP II. The premier result in 2001 was the first observation of CP violation in B decays and first significant measurement of the quantity sin 2beta. A measurement of significant CP violation in the decay eta'K0 was published in 2006. A difference between the value of sin 2beta in the two measurements would be a signal of physics beyond the Standard Model. Professor James Smith can be reached at . See current Curriculum Vitae.

Kevin Stenson

Professor Kevin Stenson has been working in experimental high energy physics, aka particle physics, since 1995. Until recently, all of the experiments he has been involved in were conducted at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside of Chicago and involved the investigation of the properties of charm and beauty quarks as part of the E791, FOCUS, and BTeV collaborations. In May, 2005 he joined the CU faculty and began working on the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment which will be located inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Colorado is involved in commissioning of the forward pixel detector. Professor Stenson is also interested in investigating rare B decays at CMS. Professor Kevin 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 Steve 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. Research 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.