PIPages
Labs

Ayres Freitas

University of Pittsburgh, PA·Physics

Discovering new laws of physics often means spotting a very faint signal hidden under a much larger, well-understood background. That only works if the predictions for the known particles are precise enough to trust.

Fields

Physics

Astronomy & Astrophysics

Topics

high energy physics

particle physics phenomenology

electroweak corrections

Grants
1 known grant, through Jul 2027

What they work on

  1. Develop calculational techniques for higher-order electroweak corrections, the quantum refinements needed to interpret precision measurements at the Large Hadron Collider and at planned electron-positron colliders.
  2. Analyze jet observables, the properties of particle sprays from quarks and gluons, using fragmentation functions to a jet together with Soft-Collinear Effective Theory.
  3. Compare experimental constraints on effective neutrino and Higgs interactions with direct searches for the new particles that could mediate them, mapping the complementarity of the LHC, neutrino-beam experiments and future colliders.
  4. Compute gravitational wave predictions with effective field theory methods, in particular the memory effect, a lasting spacetime distortion, in binary systems with large mass ratios.

More about the research

This program builds the theoretical tools and calculation methods needed for that comparison, spanning subatomic particles, gravity and cosmology, and connecting them to data from current and planned experiments.

Why it matters

Precise theoretical predictions are what allow experiments to tell a genuine new-physics signal from ordinary background. The calculations proposed here could sharpen interpretation of LHC measurements, neutrino-beam experiments, proposed electron-positron colliders and gravitational wave observations, and expand basic knowledge of the fundamental laws governing matter and gravity.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

Investigations in High Energy Physics

NSF · Aug 2024 – Jul 2027

Closest labs

Nikolaos Kidonakis

Kennesaw State University, GA·Physics

Calculate soft-gluon corrections, from low-energy gluon radiation, to top-antitop pair, single-top, and top-pair-plus-Z or Higgs production at NNLO and N3LO, including differential distributions for LHC and future colliders.

Kyoungchul Kong

University of Kansas, KS·Physics

Develop quantum algorithms for particle physics data analysis, collision event reconstruction and anomaly detection.

Suyog Shrestha

Washington College, MD·Physics

Search ATLAS data from the Large Hadron Collider for new Higgs-like scalar particles that decay into two bottom quarks and two W bosons, in final states with one or two leptons, a decay channel ATLAS has not yet studied.

The school

University of Pittsburgh: 83 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 403 research doctorates a year.

More about University of Pittsburgh

Reach out

A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.