of Victoria
AstronomyNavigation
BA (Harvard), MA (Princeton), PhD (Princeton)
Experimental particle and astroparticle physics
Fundamental physics; new technologies and techniques for answering humankind's ultimate questions about nature, and the basic principle that govern its behaviour, from the very smallest to the very largest scales.
My research attempts to find answers to the following two questions: why is the universe predominantly made of matter and why does the expansion of the universe appear to be accelerating?
On BaBar, we study the phenomenon of CP violation. CP (or charge-parity) violation is a property of the Standard Model of particle physics, and is observed when particles decay via just one of the 4 known physical forces: the weak interaction. As the physicist Andrei Sakharov showed in 1967, CP violation is necessary for a matter-antimatter asymmetry to develop in the early universe after the Big Bang. However, there is not enough CP violation in the Standard Model of particle physics to explain why the universe we observe today is made of matter. Thus we have the question of where the extra CP violation could occur. This is one of physics' major unanswered questions. My colleagues and I specifically search for CP violation in decays of bottom quarks to the triplet of quarks: c anti-c d. This process is observable at the BaBar detector at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Program near Palo Alto, CA. This process is especially sensitive to potential sources of CP violation from extentions to the Standard Model at high energies which could help explain the asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the universe.
Come and talk to me anytime if you're interested in working on a physics project, if you have any general physics questions, or if there's anything else I could help you with.