Talks

Since the dawn of civilization, humans have attempted to dissect the world and uncover its fundamental constituents. Today, this quest continues in the field of particle physics, the study of the fundamental subatomic particle that make up everything in the universe. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a massive underground particle accelerator that physicists hope will reveal new secrets about the physical world. Located just outside Geneva, Switzerland at CERN, it has a circumference of 27 km and is the product of a collaboration that involves thousands of scientists worldwide. This presentation will talk about the LHC and some of the exciting new ideas it may confirm.

Physics emerged from the twentieth century with two remarkably successful descriptions of nature which stand in striking contrast. Quantum mechanics describes the subatomic realm with intrinsic uncertainties and probabilities. On the other hand, Einstein's general relativity describe gravitational phenomena in an exacting geometric arena. Theoretical physicists have struggled for over fifty years trying to combine these views in a single unified framework. More recently, superstring theory has drawn a huge amount of interest as a leading contender to provide such a unification. Superstring theory is a theory of strings, branes, extra spacetime dimensions and much more. In my lecture, I will try to give a flavour for what superstring theory is all about and why physicists, like myself, continue to be so excited about this, perhaps the final theory.

The gauge mediation models with a gravitino mass in the eV range is a quite attractive scenario which causes no cosmological/astrophysical problems. The model construction with such a light gravitino is, however, quite challenging and in most cases ends up with the problems with the suppressed gaugino mass, the vacuum instability and the Landau pole problems of the Standard Model gauge coupling constants. In this talk, I explain our proposal in which a gauge mediation model with the gravitino whose mass in the eV range is realized without having those problems.