Faculty

Peter Arnold
 Ph.D., 1986, Stanford

Sergio Conetti
 Ph.D., 1967, Trieste

Bradley B. Cox
 Ph.D., 1967, Duke

Edmond Craig Dukes
 Ph.D., 1984, Michigan

Paul Fendley
 Ph.D., 1990, Harvard

Paul M. Fishbane
 Ph.D., 1967, Princeton

Robert J. Hirosky
 Ph.D., 1994, Rochester

Pham Q. Hung
 Ph.D., 1978, UCLA

Christopher Neu
 PhD, 2003, Ohio State University

Harry B. Thacker
 Ph.D., 1973, UCLA

Diana Vaman
 PhD, 2001, SUNY, Stony Brook

The experimental group (Cox, Conetti, Dukes, Hirosky) participates in major research collaborations at the world’s leading particle accelerators in the U.S. and in Europe where we are able to study the most fundamental interactions of matter to elicit the inner workings of the natural world. The group is housed in its own building a short walk from the main physics building. This superb laboratory has an electronics lab, mechanical shop, a large assembly area, and powerful computing capabilities. For details on the activities of our HEP experimental group, see our website at: http://faculty.virginia.edu/hep/

The Theoretical Elementary Particle Physics group acknowledges that the fundamental task of physics is to learn the rules of the basic interactions governing the behavior of matter and to search for new laws when present knowledge fails to answer the remaining mysteries of the observable universe. At the foundation of modern theories of particle physics is a deep and beautiful symmetry principle: the invariance of physical laws under symmetry transformations at every space-time point. Theories that show this symmetry are known as Yang-Mills or Gauge Theories. The Standard Model of Strong, Electromagnetic and Weak interactions is the most successful of these theories. It describes all known interactions of matter except gravity.

The Electroweak part of the Standard Model is being tested to a high degree of precision. The Strong interaction part, the Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) Theory, which describes the interactions among the quarks, is being closely scrutinized, both perturbatively and nonperturbatively. The Standard Model is incomplete, however, since a number of fundamental puzzles, such as CP violation and the origin of masses, remain unsolved. The solutions to these problems probably lie outside the framework of the Standard Model. How does one solve the problem of masses? How does one solve QCD? These are among the topics under active investigation by Professors Fishbane, Hung and Thacker.

UVa Physics Contact Information

 

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