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 searches.
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 signif
icant 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 explanat
ions have not been completely ruled out.
A space mission, SNAP, is now being considered that would increase the discovery rate for such supern
ovas to about 2,000 per year.
The satellite called SNAP (Supernova / Acceleration Probe) would be a space based telescope with a on
e square degree field of view with 1 billion pixels.
Detector and Software development is being carried out for all these projects in partnerhip with Engi
neering Division and NERSC.
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