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What is High Energy Theory?

Theoretical particle physics has advanced its frontiers enormously in recent years. The success of the Weinberg-Salam model of electroweak interactions, culminating in the recent discovery of the Higgs boson, has led to efforts to find a unified theory including quantum chromodynamics and perhaps general relativity as well. A theory of all interactions and particles usually has far-reaching implications, for instance, predicting proton decay, and affecting the development of the universe in the first few moments after the big bang. Thus particle physics now relates to problems in cosmology, such as galaxy formation and the observed predominance of matter over anti-matter. The most ambitious of these unified theories– superstrings–is being intensively studied at Rutgers, which has one of the strongest particle theory groups in the world. Other problems, such as developing methods to study non- abelian gauge theories in nonperturbative regimes, electroweak baryogenisis, and computational methods, are also being studied. Advances in the understanding of field theory have yielded techniques and predicted phenomena which are relevant to mathematics, statistical mechanics, and condensed matter physics.