Physics at the Frontier: Colliders to Cosmology

This award funds the research activities of Professors Will Kinney, Dejan Stojkovic, Doreen Wackeroth, and Ciaran Williams at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. The PIs will conduct a wide-ranging research program which aims to provide answers to key open questions at the frontier of particle physics, cosmology, and gravity research. Research topics to be investigated span a large range, including the physics of cosmological inflation, the physics of black holes, the physics of Dark Energy (which is believed responsible for driving accelerated cosmological expansion), the properties of the Higgs boson, and studies of the theory that underlies the strong interaction and its effects at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and at future accelerators. This research aligns with NSF's mission to promote the progress of science and advance the national welfare by performing research aimed at extending our understanding of the origin and structure of the universe, and the properties of fundamental particles and fields. As part of this research, Professors Kinney, Stojkovic, Wackeroth, and Williams will involve graduate students and postdocs in their research and thereby provide training for junior physicists beginning research in this field. The PIs will also continue to conduct public outreach, including public lectures, planetarium shows, interactions with the press and other media, and the Science & Art Cabaret series, now in its twelfth season. More technically, Kinney's research will involve investigation of so-called "swampland" criteria in the context of early-universe physics. He will also seek to constrain the physics of inflation with new observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background and Large-scale Structure, and (in collaboration with Stojkovic) explore possible resolutions of the Hubble tension. Stojkovic will continue the development of a comprehensive event generator BlackMax which is currently used by the LHC collaborations in searches for exotic physics. In collaboration with Wackeroth and Williams, Stojkovic will also explore the gamma-ray and neutrino signatures of bubble production associated with false Higgs-vacuum decay and other cosmological phase transitions. Stojkovic will also study the imposition of observational strong-lensing constraints on a wide class of modified-gravity models. Wackeroth will focus on mixed QCD-Electroweak (EW) corrections to W and Z boson production, which is relevant for a high-precision W-mass measurement. Wackeroth will also provide improved predictions for SM processes which will allow for new tests of non-standard interactions of the top quark and the quartic electroweak self-interactions. Williams will calculate NNLO corrections to Higgs production in association with a b-jet, and will also calculate the mixed QCD-EW terms for the H-to-bb process and use the results to constrain the ultimate precision for the bottom-quark Yukawa coupling which may be reached at future lepton colliders. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.