Yale research has prominent place in U.S. plan for particle physics

A high-level advisory group to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) last week approved a new set of funding priorities related to particle physics research — and Yale’s leadership aligns strongly with its goals.

The High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP), which advises the DOE’s Office of Science and the National Science Foundation, voted on Dec. 8 to accept a plan developed by the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5), a subpanel to HEPAP, at an event in Washington, D.C. that included leading physicists from across the nation.

Yale’s Karsten Heeger, the Eugene Higgins Professor and Chair of Physics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, is deputy chair of the panel; physics professor Sarah Demers is a P5 panel member.

Heeger said the P5 report is a 10-year strategic plan with a 20-year vision for U.S. particle physics research. “The panel thought about where the next big discoveries might lie and how we could maximize impact within budget, to support future discoveries and the next generation of researchers and technical workers who will be needed to achieve them,” Heeger said.

P5 develops a long-term strategic plan every 8 -to -10 years; the last report was issued in 2014.

The panel identified three main scientific themes in its report: decoding the quantum realm, revealing new knowledge about the hidden universe at a cosmological level, and exploring new scientific paradigms emerging from the intersection of quantum and cosmological research.

Among the report’s specific recommendations are the completion of construction projects and ongoing experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Switzerland; the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) in Illinois; the CMB-S4 network of ground-based telescopes observing the cosmic wave background; the expansion of the South Pole neutrino observatory IceCube-Gen2; and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.

“Yale and its faculty from the Department of Physics has leadership activity in key areas of this plan,” Heeger said. “We have a strong, vibrant program in particle physics.”

Yale physicists Paul Tipton, Keith Baker, and Demers have had longstanding roles in the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, exploring the secrets of the Higgs boson, and physicist Larry Gladney, who is also Yale’s Phyllis A. Wallace Dean of Diversity and Faculty Development, has a leadership role at the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Physicist Reina Maruyama is a major contributor to ongoing science at the IceCube experiment, and physicist Laura Newburgh is pursuing the study of cosmic evolution with CMB-S4, and developing control and data acquisition software for the telescopes.

The report also recommends increased funding for theoretical physics research. At Yale, physicists Tom Appelquist, Walter Goldberger, Ian Moult, David Poland, and Witold Skiba all contribute to leading research in high energy theory. The report notes, “Just as hints of new physics revealed by experiment drive new theoretical developments, theory guides experimental inquiries and enriches our understanding of fundamental principles.”

Priyamvada Natarajan, the Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor of Astronomy and professor of physics and chair of the Department of Astronomy uses galaxy clusters as gravitational lenses to probe the nature of the fundamental forces and particles that constitute the building blocks of the universe with a focus on the elucidation of dark matter.

Yale’s Wright Lab, and Heeger’s group, meanwhile, are constructing key instrumentation for the DUNE experiment. The technical infrastructure and research facilities at Wright Lab have been key to the development of detector components and upgrades for both ATLAS and DUNE.

“There are so many compelling scientific questions that we want to pursue, and so many good ideas about technologies and facilities that would open up new lines of inquiry, that it was a challenge to work within the budget profiles provided by the Department of Energy,” Demers said. Demers is also part of an effort to search for new physics at the Mu2e experiment at Fermilab, in Illinois.

“We converged on a portfolio of projects that will let us investigate neutrinos, the Higgs boson, dark matter, the accelerating expansion of the universe, new accelerator and detector technologies, and more,” Demers said. “We have deep involvement in a lot of this work at Yale, so it is going to be an exciting decade.”

The P5 report also recommended that the U.S. invest in initiatives aimed at developing the skilled workforce that will be needed for new technologies that may emerge from the next generation of particle physics research. Discoveries in previous eras have led to manufacturing opportunities and new jobs in industries as varied as telecommunications, medical products, personal electronics, and the financial sector.

“In putting together our report, we thought about the science, of course, but also about the societal impact,” Heeger said. “There are direct benefits to our society that come out of physics research, everything from gaining a deeper understanding of who we are in the context of the universe, to new technologies. And all of this provides a training ground for a highly skilled workforce going forward.”