OVerview
The Physics Division conduct basic research at high energy scale through experimental activities at Fermilab and at the nearby Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), aimed to examine the physics of the heavy b and t quark, important aspects of electroweak symmetry breaking, and CP violation. Non-accelerator experiments are also conducted to study neutrinos and rare processes.
Theoretical work spans the full range of energy scales, from particle spectroscopy, perturbative QCD, and related phenomenology to studies of grand unification theories, supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theories, and general gauge theories of strong and electroweak interactions.
A large group in the Physics Division is participating to the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (Geneva, Switzerland), to study the origin of mass at the electroweak scale, top quark decays and supersymmetry.
Recent studies of Type Ia supernovas, including measurements by the Supernova Cosmology Group led by Saul Perlmutter at LBNL and the High Z-SN Search team lead by Brian P. Schmidt, have produced significant evidence that over cosmological distances they appear dimmer than would be expected if the universe's rate of expansion was constant or slowing down. This was the first direct experimental evidence for an accelerating universe potentially driven by a positive Cosmological Constant. However, only about 80 supernovas accumulated over several years have been studied and other explanations have not been completely ruled out. A space mission, SNAP, is now being considered that would increase the discovery rate for such supernovas to about 2,000 per year. The satellite called SNAP (Supernova / Acceleration Probe) would be a space based telescope with a one square degree field of view with 1 billion pixels.
Detector and Software development is being carried out for all these projects in partnerhip with Engineering Division and NERSC.
