Physics Department Faculty:
John Huth
Donner Professor of SciencePhD 1985, UC-Berkeley
John Huth's interests are in the experimental origins of electroweak symmetry breaking, and tests of conjectured solutions to the gauge hierarchy problem. The Standard Model is considered to be the most complete scientific theory in existence, and yet presents some of the most interesting questions about the nature of symmetry breaking, the origin of mass and how gravity is unified with the other forces. Tied in with this is the origin of dark matter, which may be associated with relic particles from the big bang and have their origin in exotic forms of matter, such as supersymmetric particles.
The present energy scale being probed by frontier accelerators, the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider (under construction) are probing the energy range of the TeV scale, where the manifestations of symmetry breaking are almost certain to be evident. The Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) is a large, multipurpose experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which explores proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron accelerator. The experiment discovered the last of the predicted quarks, the top quark in 1994, and is exploring the energy range that is thought to contain evidence for symmetry breaking.
The next generation of experiments will be at the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN accelerator complex in Geneva, Switzerland. Professor Huth is in charge of computing and physics for the U. S. Collaboration participating in the ATLAS experiment at CERN. Coupled with this computational initiative is the new computer science research on grid computing, involving new concepts such as "virtual data".