ElementaryParticle Physics

According to our present understanding, the smallest building blocks of matter are elementary particles, like quarks and leptons. The ‘Standard Model’ is a theory that describes the elementary particles and their various interactions. The Standard Model is hugely successful in explaining multiple phenomena of elementary particles, and all its predictions have been tested in experiments. However, theoretical and experimental hints suggest that the Standard Model of Particle Physics, though correct, maybe an incomplete theory of nature. Examples of these hints include recently observed experimental data on meson decays and muon’s magnetic moment, the existence of the dark matter in the universe, the smallness of neutrino masses, etc. It requires new particles and interactions, often called New Physics, to solve these problems. Different laboratories across the globe — the LHC at CERN in Switzerland, KEK laboratory in Japan, are currently searching for New Physics. In our group, we investigate different models of New Physics and how to search them in quark and lepton physics. test

Cosmology

Cosmology is the study of the origin and the evolution of the universe. Problems of cosmology that are currently of interest to us include i) mysterious existence of dark matter in the universe, ii) the origin of baryogenesis, i.e., an asymmetry between matter in and antimatter in the observable universe, iii) several open questions related to cosmic inflation at the very early universe iv) recently observed discrepancies in the measurements of the Hubble constant, etc. Some of these unsolved problems in cosmology are closely related to elementary particle physics. Solutions might come from the study of both fields.