The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics has awarded the 2018 Prize in Particles and Fields to our QMAP colleague Jaroslav Trnka “For the discovery and exploration of new physical and mathematical principles underlying the dynamics of particle scattering amplitudes in a wide range of theories.”
John Terning (a former UC Berkeley post-doc) has written a new book with Bill Poirier (a former UC Berkeley student), and Yasunori Nomura (a current UC Berkeley professor).
The Physics department has hired four new faculty and Math has hired one new faculty, all in the areas of quantum field theory, gravity, and strings. Veronika Hubeny and Mukund Rangamani arrived in the Physics department this September, Jaroslav Trnka will arrive in December, and Sergei Dubovsky and will begin July 2016. Tudor Dimofte will join the Math department in 2016. All the positions are part of campus Hiring Investment Program.
UC Davis Provost Ralph Hexter has announced that the Faculty Hiring Investment Program (HIP) has accepted a joint proposal from the Physics and Math departments, called “Fundamental Physics and Mathematics of the Universe”, which will entail hiring four professors in theoretical physics and mathematics. The positions will be in both the physics and math departments.
Albert De Roeck will give a public lecture entitled “The Large Hadron Collider: The Big Bang Machine” on Thur. Mar. 27 at 8 pm in the UC Davis Welcome Center Presentation Room. Tickets will be $7 (free for students).
An update on the Higgs-like resonance discovered last summer was given by the ATLAS experiment on Dec. 13, indicating that the decay to two photons is about 2 standard deviations off of the standard model value, which may indicate that there are additional new particles within reach of the Large Hadron Collider.
The largest discrepancy is in the Higgs-like boson decaying to two photons (H → γ γ).
On July 4, CMS and ATLAS announced the discovery of a Higgs-like resonance. An unstable boson quickly turns into other more stable particles, in this case the clearest signal shows up in the boson decaying to two photons or four charged particles like electrons, muons, and their antiparticles. The two experiments saw a characteristic enhancement (a.k.a. a resonance or “bump”) in both of these types of decays.
