Stanford University
APPLIED PHYSICS/PHYSICS COLLOQUIUM
Tuesday, November 19, 2019
4:30 p.m. on campus in Hewlett Teaching Center, Rm. 200
Joseph D. Lykken
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
“The Future of Particle Physics”
High energy particle physics has the ambitious goals of uncovering the most fundamental constituents of reality and deciphering the rules by which those constituents interact, both today and in the first instants of the Big Bang. Our ability to construct higher and higher energy particle accelerators does not scale well with these ambitions, so progress here will increasingly depend on global collaboration and being smarter with the data that we have in hand.
Beyond colliders, the future of this field will increasingly rely on three other approaches that I will describe:
— Transformational advances in the sensitivities and capabilities of sensors to detect feebly interacting particles such as dark matter and neutrinos.
— Increasing our access to extreme environments provided by Nature, such as supernovae, black hole mergers, and the echoes of the Big Bang.
— Using theory to map fundamental questions seemingly out of experimental reach, e.g. the nature of quantum gravity and spacetime, into quantum systems and simulations that can be created and studied in the laboratory.
