Particle Physics

Group “Fundamental Interactions”

The particle physics team studies the elementary constituents of matter and their fundamental interactions. Its members seek to understand to what extent the Standard Model of particle physics describes what is observed, and explore new theories to explain what might exist beyond it. The main objective is to help discover new particles and fundamental interactions. This work focuses on processes observed in experiments such as those at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, as well as the search for dark matter in the Universe in underground experiments. Also of concern are properties of elementary particles, such as the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, which are measured with 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 the properties of these composite particles, their decays, and their interactions. Besides explaining and predicting fundamental properties of matter, this work is also necessary for most 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 example of quarks and gluons in the strongly non-linear regime of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), of hadrons at low energy, or of non-relativistic dark matter particles. These approaches include a variety of effective field theories and massively parallel numerical simulations on supercomputers in lattice QCD.

The team includes four permanent members, one emeritus, and a comparable number of PhD students and post-docs. It also regularly hosts scientists from all over the world.