Search Talks

COVID-19 is a mysterious disease associated with a large number of unanswered questions. 

In this talk we review what is currently known, what is still a mystery and highlight some of our recent work on the role of climate, blood type and vaccinations on the transmission of the disease and on the extent of "dark infections", the asymptomatic and untested proportion of infections. We end with a list of open research questions that may be amenable to techniques from physics and data science.

The discovery of the Higgs boson has revealed that the quartic Higgs self-coupling becomes small at very high energy scales. Guided by this observation, I introduce Higgs Parity, which is a spontaneously broken symmetry exchanging the standard model Higgs with its parity partner. In addition to explaining the small Higgs quartic coupling, Higgs Parity can provide a dark matter candidate, solve the strong CP problem, and arise from an SO(10) grand unified gauge symmetry. I will show that the Higgs Parity symmetry breaking scale is determined by standard model parameters and predicts experimental signals such as the proton decay rate and the warmness of dark matter. As a result, Higgs Parity provides a tight correlation between future precision measurements of standard model parameters and these experimental signals.

While it is considered to be one of the most promising hints of new physics beyond the Standard Model, dark matter is as-yet known only through its gravitational influence on astronomical and cosmological observables. I will discuss our current best evidence for dark matter's existence as well as the constraints that astrophysical probes can place on its properties, while highlighting some tantalizing anomalies that could indicate non-gravitational dark matter interactions. Future observations, along with synergies between astrophysical and experimental searches, have the potential to illuminate dark matter's fundamental nature and its influence on the evolution of matter in the cosmos from the first stars and galaxies to today.