University of Oklahoma - High Energy Physics (Final Report)
The High Energy Physics program at the University of Oklahoma, Pat Skubic, Principal Investigator, is attempting to understand nature at the deepest level using the most advanced experimental and theoretical tools. The four experimental faculty, Brad Abbott, Phil Gutierrez, Pat Skubic, and Mike Strauss, together with post-doctoral associates and graduate students, are finishing their work as part of the DØ collaboration at Fermilab, and increasingly focusing their investigations at the Large Hadron Collidor (LHC) as part of the ATLAS Collaboration. Work at the LHC has become even more exciting with the recent discovery by ATLAS and the other collaboration, CMS, of the long-sought Higgs boson, which plays a key role in generating masses for the elementary constituents of matter. Work of the OUHEP group has been in the three areas of hardware, software, and analysis. Now that the Higgs boson has been discovered, completing the Standard Model of fundamental physics, new efforts will focus on finding hints of physics beyond the standard model, such as supersymmetry. The OUHEP theory group (Kim Milton, PI) also consists of four faculty members, Howie Baer, Chung Kao, Kim Milton, and Yun Wang, and associated students and postdocs. They are involved in understanding fundamental issues in formulating theories of the microworld, and in proposing models that carry us past the Standard Model, which is an incomplete description of nature. They therefore work in close concert with their experimental colleagues. One also can study fundamental physics by looking at the large scale structure of the universe; in particular the "dark energy" that seems to be causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate, effectively makes up about 3/4 of the energy in the universe, and yet is totally unidentified. Dark energy and dark matter, which together account for nearly all of the energy in the universe, are an important probe of fundamental physics at the very shortest distances, or at the very highest energies. The outcomes of the group's combined experimental and theoretical research will be an improved understanding of nature, at the highest energies reachable, from which applications to technological innovation will surely result, as they always have from such studies in the past.