Fermilab: Research Lab on the Energy Frontier

Research:Theoretical High Energy Physics

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Theoretical High-Energy Physics

Fermilab, in addition to its extensive work on experiments, devotes a significant effort to the advancement of the theory of high-energy particle physics. The most interesting predictions of theory guide, to a large degree, the choice of which experiments will be performed. Results from experiments in turn provide new information about the way the world works and stimulates the development of new theories.

Members of the Fermilab Theory Department are at the forefront of studies of models in which the top quark plays a key role in dynamical symmetry breaking. This mechanism could explain the spectrum of quark masses, why each quark has the mass it does.

Fermilab theorists are also pursuing lattice gauge theory. This endeavor uses computational power to extract, from the underlying Standard Model, quantitative predictions about the behavior of familiar particles such as protons and pions. These studies utilize ACPMAPS, one of the most powerful computers in the world, developed at Fermilab.

Another topic of investigation is the construction of string theories as a way of unifying physics at the most basic level of gravitation and quantum mechanics. The goal of these mathematical models is to provide a self-consistent framework for understanding the forces present at extremely high energies.

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