Teaching
Phenomenology of Elementary Particles (SoSe 23; SoSe 22; WiSe 21/22)
The course is addressed to Master and PhD Students.
This course aims to provide students with the theoretical tools necessary to make predictions on particle physics processes that can be observed in a laboratory. Students will have a good knowledge of the Standard Model of fundamental interactions, of the (exact and approximate) symmetries that play a crucial role in particle physics and will be able to calculate in perturbation theory cross sections and decay rates, including one-loop radiative corrections. Students will also gain a good knowledge of the effective field theory technique and of the non-perturbative formulation of field theories on a lattice.
Particle Physics and Cosmology at the interface (WiSe 22/23)
The course is addressed to Master and PhD Students.
There is a symbiotic relationship between particle physics and cosmology. This is not surprising since both deal with physics in similar environments. Cosmology, the physics of the early Universe, is concerned with matter at the high temperatures characterizing the Universe at this epoch. Particle physics, the physics of fundamental constituents and their interactions, deals with phenomena at very short distances which can only be probed at high energy. Since high temperatures and high energies are synonimous, not surprisingly particle physics and cosmology are deeply intertwined.
In these lectures I examine some of the principal issues in cosmology from a particle physics point of view, posing attention on the consequences the breakdown of discrete symmetries, like CP, can have for the evolution of the Universe.
Fundamental interactions and nuclear matter (SoSe 21; WiSe 20/21)
The course is mainly addressed to Master and PhD Students. The participation of young Researchers is also very welcome.
A number of high-impact nuclear and particle physics experiments are planned over the next decade that will test the limits of the Standard Model of particle physics, probing for subtle violations of symmetries at low energies or new particles and interactions at the energy frontier. Examples include direct dark matter detection, neutrinoless double beta decay, neutrino oscillations, and searches for electric and magnetic dipole moments of nuclei and atoms. Exascale computing could soon enable a predictive theory of nuclear structure and reactions, with quantifiable and systematically improvable uncertainties. Such a theory will also help us connect quantum chromodynamics to the properties of cold neutron stars and hot supernova cores, environments governed by the strong interaction.
In these lectures we discuss how a quantitative bridge between the theory of fundamental interactions and the properties of nuclei and nuclear matter will require a synthesis of lattice QCD+QED, effective field theories, and ab initio methods for solving the nuclear many-body problem. While there are significant challenges that must be addressed in developing this triad of theoretical tools, the rapid advance of computing is accelerating progress. In particular, we focus this course on the anticipated advances from lattice QCD+QED and how these advances will impact effective theories of nuclear physics by providing critical input, such as constraints on unknown low-energy constants.
Current tensions in Flavour Physics (SoSe 20; WiSe 19/20)
The course is mainly addressed to Master and PhD Students. The participation of young Researchers is also very welcome.
The last fifty years witnessed the extraordinary success of the Standard Model of Particle Physics and of the Standard Model of Cosmology. These theories, which are able to explain an incredible number of physical processes and experimental observations, leave, however, many fundamental questions unanswered: the origin of the asymmetry between matter and anti-matter in our Universe, the nature of dark matter, and dark energy, the existence of a plurality of particle families, and the structures of the mixing matrices in the quark and lepton sectors. Flavour Physics offers the opportunity of unveil some of these mysteries.
In this course several aspects of Flavour Physics will be critically reviewed. In that framework, special attention will be devoted to the role of modern Lattice QCD+QED calculations and to recent discrepancies between the theoretical and experimental results, suggesting the existence of New Physics beyond the Standard Model. New ideas to improve the accuracy of the theoretical predictions and future developments will be presented and discussed.