UNC-CH Nuclear Colloquium
Emanuele Mereghetti, LBNL
“Probing new physics at high and low energy”
The Standard Model of particle physics is an extremely successful theory, tested over a wide range of energy scales. Still, there are many fascinating open problems, from the origin of the matter in the universe, to the nature of neutrinos and dark matter, that indicate that the Standard Model is not the definitive theory of nature. A vibrant experimental program is searching for new physics at the frontiers of the Standard Model. In this talk I will discuss searches at the energy frontier, probed by collider experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider, and the intensity frontier, that look for deviations in extremely precise low-energy experiments. I will describe the complementary information on the nature of new physics that can be learned from these two classes of experiments, and discuss the challenges we face in providing precise predictions, with controlled theoretical uncertainties, for experiments in both regimes.