My papers (Spires)
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My papers (Spires) |
I'm a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton PCTS (formerly a graduate student at Cornell University, and for the first half of 2008 a graduate fellow of the KITP in Santa Barbara). My interests are in theoretical high-energy physics, with a particular focus on two areas: understanding possibilities for physics beyond the Standard Model, and understanding the physics of strongly-coupled gauge theories (of which the strong nuclear force that binds quarks into protons and neutrons is an example).
When the Large Hadron Collider begins taking physics data, we will for the first time be operating at an energy scale where we should get clear information about the breaking of electroweak symmetry and other new physics. To be prepared we need to understand both the possibilities for what new physics could look like, and the capabilities of the experiments to distinguish different possibilities.
Things I have worked on along these lines:
I also am interested in unresolved questions about the Standard Model itself. One ingredient of the Standard Model, QCD, describes the dynamics of quarks and gluons which make up protons, neutrons, pions, and other strongly bound composite particles. The structure and interactions of these bound states are still extremely difficult to calculate from first principles. I am interested in using a variety of theoretical tools (new and old) to study these problems. More generally, I am interested in the physics of other strongly-coupled gauge theories with certain features in common with real-world QCD. It is possible that such theories will play a role in electroweak symmetry breaking or supersymmetry breaking; more generally, they are an interesting theoretical laboratory.
Related things I have worked on or am working on:
Here is a talk I gave at the SUSY 2007 conference, on positivity of the S-parameter in calculable models of holographic technicolor with custodial symmetry. I suspect that S > 0 in custodially symmetric theories in general.
Earlier talks:
A couple of talks I have given to our collider phenomenology group:
My student seminar at the TASI '06 summer school, on holography and hadrons, or a similar talk at the Santa Fe 2006 Summer Workshop (with less introductory material and somewhat more new work).
Here is a talk I gave at the 2nd LHC Olympics workshop in February 2006, analyzing the Harvard black box. (The website for the workshop seems to have vanished, so I've put up a local copy of my slides here.) Given the recent burst of interest in highly boosted tops and studies of jet mass, slides 17 and 18 on the decay of a heavy vector boson to tops might be of interest....
A talk I gave at the MC4BSM physics workshop on model-independent studies of t' -> t + invisible.
The page for the Cornell Collider Phenomenology Group Meetings is here. Latest updates ~1 year old.
My undergraduate work was with the CDF collaboration, as part of the University of Chicago CDF group. I mostly focused on identification of tau leptons.
Obligatory bit of not-physics from my favorite American writer (before his American phase):
"But sometimes I get the impression that all this is a rubbishy rumor, a tired legend, that it has been created out of those same suspicious granules of approximate knowledge that I use myself when my dreams muddle through regions known to me only by hearsay or out of books, so that the first knowledgeable person who has really seen at the time the places referred to will refuse to recognize them, will make fun of the exoticism of my thoughts, the hills of my sorrow, the precipices of my imagination, and will find in my conjectures just as many topographical errors as he will anachronisms."
(Any relevance this might have for physics is left as an exercise for the reader.)
You can reach me by e-mail: mreece@lepp.cornell.edu
