Electroweak symmetry breaking, flavour physics and ultralight Dark Matter

The mass spectrum of known elementary particles spans 12 orders of magnitude from sub eV neutrino masses to the heavy flavours and the Higgs whereas the unknown, particle dark matter, could be orders of magnitude heavier than the top quark or lighter than neutrinos by almost 20 orders of magnitude. Yet the highest of these masses still lies 15 orders of magnitude below the Planck mass where new states should arise to render gravity consistent. Is there a hidden structure behind this disparity of scales or within any of these sectors? The big picture however can only be addressed starting small and so PhD students would begin dedicated to any of the following projects: i) electroweak symmetry breaking and the nature of the Higgs; characterize the scalar particle found at LHC with the incoming data and making use of effective field theory to determine how closely it behaves as elementary ii) the flavour of standard model particles; study possible underlying symmetries to explain the generational structure of fermions and derive phenomenological consequences be it with effective field theory or models of gauged flavour iii) searches for ultralight dark-matter; study the reach of very precise quantum devices like co-magnetometers and atomic clocks in the search for dark matter so light that it behaves like a background field around us iv) the UV completion of gravity; making use of the basis for amplitudes of on-shell spin J exchange search numerically for solutions to the unitarization of gravity, as well as using a bottom-up approach in deriving consistency constraints on the spectrum of new states. The Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology (IPPP) in Durham, has an outstanding expertise in the theoretical aspects of physics beyond the Standard Model and on its phenomenological signatures and it is an ideal place for this ambitious project.