Kaustubh Agashe
University of Maryland, MD·Physics
The Standard Model of particle physics accounts for the known particles and forces with remarkable accuracy, yet it leaves glaring gaps. Its measured parameters span wildly different scales, a set of puzzles known as hierarchy problems, and it contains no suitable candidate for dark matter, the unseen substance that makes up most of the matter in the universe.
- Fields
Physics
Astronomy & Astrophysics
- Topics
particle physics
beyond the Standard Model
supersymmetry
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Develop frameworks in which Standard Model particles are composite and fused with supersymmetry, and test whether they resolve the electroweak and flavor hierarchy puzzles of the Standard Model.
- Work out how WIMP dark matter candidates arising in the supersymmetry-compositeness framework could appear in direct and indirect detection, including gamma-ray signals at the Cherenkov Telescope Array.
- Calculate subtle features of Hawking radiation from primordial black holes as non-particle dark matter, and assess their detectability at proposed observatories such as AMEGO and e-ASTROGAM.
- Identify how these Standard Model extensions can be tested at the Large Hadron Collider and through lower-energy precision measurements and cosmological observations.
More about the research
This theoretical program builds extensions of the Standard Model to address those gaps and works out concretely how experiments could confirm or rule them out.
Why it matters
This is foundational work on the laws underlying all of the natural sciences: why fundamental parameters take the values they do and what dark matter is made of. Its value is in the predictions it supplies, since concrete signatures tell collider experiments and gamma-ray observatories what to search for and give them a framework for interpreting what they do or do not see.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kyoungchul Kong
University of Kansas, KS·Physics
Develop quantum algorithms for particle physics data analysis, collision event reconstruction and anomaly detection.
Manoj Kaplinghat
University of California-Irvine, CA·Physics
Build and test models of physics beyond the Standard Model, the current theory of particles and forces, and work out what signals these extensions would produce in particle accelerator (collider) experiments.
Kuver Sinha
University of Oklahoma, OK·Physics
Constrain axions using neutron stars by combining X-ray polarization data and models of hard X-ray emission from magnetars with the group's framework for axion-induced polarization in dipolar magnetic fields.
The school
University of Maryland: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 602 research doctorates a year.
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