The particle physics team studies the basic constituents of matter and their fundamental interactions. Its members seek to understand the extent to which the so-called Standard Model of particle physics describes observation and explore theoretical scenarios for what may lie beyond. The main goal is to help uncover new fundamental particles and interactions. This work concerns processes observed in experiments, such the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, as well as the search for the Universe’s dark matter in experiments deep underground. Also concerned are properties of elementary particles, such as the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, which are measured to very high precision. In complementary work, the team is interested in understanding how the strong interaction assembles quarks and gluons into hadrons, such as the proton and neutron, and how it determines these composite particles’ properties, decays and interactions. Besides explaining and predicting fundamental properties of matter, this work is also necessary for many of the searches for new fundamental physics described previously. In its work, the team develops and uses different theoretical approaches to describe particle interactions, for instance of quarks and gluons in quantum chromodynamics’ (QCD) highly non-linear regime, of hadrons at low energy or of non-relativistic dark matter particles. These approaches include a variety effective field theories and massively-parallel numerical simulations on supercomputers in lattice QCD.

The particle physics team is comprised of four permanent members, an emeritus and a comparable number of Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows. It also regularly welcomes visiting scientists from around the world.