Physics Colloquia: Peter Onyisi: A Taste of Quark Flavor Physics

Particle physics seeks to understand the fundamental forms of matter and forces in the universe. The Standard Model of particle physics is simultaneously extremely successful and extremely incomplete: it passes all experimental tests within its domain of validity, but it is not the law followed by most of the contents of the universe, nor does it give satisfactory answers to basic questions about the existence of matter. Seeking to go "beyond the Standard Model" and understand these empirical facts is the motivating drive for research in the field, and progress could come from any one of a large number of research directions.
I will discuss one of these approaches: studying the behavior of the particles called quarks in detail. The interactions of this family, which includes the heaviest known fundamental particle, are potentially sensitive to new degrees of freedom via quantum effects. This potentially even includes unknown particles too massive to produce in current colliders. I will discuss recent progress in this so-called quark flavor physics at the Large Hadron Collider and other facilities, the current hints of anomalies, and what we envision for future experiments in this area.