Experimental Particle Physics

Understanding the fundamental forces and particles of the universe. Electroweak symmetry breaking, heavy flavor physics, searches for physics beyond the Standard Model, matter/antimatter asymmetry, dark matter, single-photon detection, neutrino properties, dark energy, instrumentation and detector development.

At Stanford, studies of the fundamental interactions and the elementary particles are enhanced by close collaboration between the Physics Department and the SLAC National Accelerator Center. The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) and the LUX-ZEPLIN Experiment (LZ) focus on the development and operation of new detector technologies to increase the sensitivity of searches for weakly interacting massive particles. The goal of the Enriched Xenon Experiment (EXO) is to detect "neutrinoless double-beta decay" using large amounts of xenon enriched in the isotope 136. The MINOS Experiment is a long-baseline neutrino experiment designed to observe the phenomenon of neutrino oscillations, an effect that is related to neutrino mass. The BABAR data set provides opportunities for studying matter/antimatter asymmetries (CP violation) and heavy flavor physics. The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider is designed to studey TeV-scale physics,  including the recently discovered Higgs Boson, collider dark matter signatures and the physics of and beyond the Standard Model. Opportunities also exist in advanced accelerator physics and in the study of gravity (e.g., LIGO, testing gravity at short distances).