Research Activities and Interests
To explore some of the biggest mysteries behind how our Universe came to be and why in the form it did, a number of different areas of particle physics research are currently being pursued:
- Searches for new states of matter produced in the energy frontier through collider interactions at the LHC at CERN with Long-Lived Particle triggers and precision timing
- New approaches to detector instrumentation at colliders for future calorimeter designs at FCC and muC through CalVision
- Neutrino mass and relic neutrino detection with PTOLEMY at LNGS
- Particle acceleration and plasma heating methods using a MOAMBA technique from PTOLEMY
- Muon collider cooling studies with BNL and FNAL
- Open water neutrino observatories with KM3NeT
The three decade long investment in collider research is the most opened-ended probe of the elementary particles and interactions. Collider physics has the gift of discovery. Given the energy scale and intensity of beams, Nature tells us all that it knows about particle interactions and new mass states. The more we can do to maximize the information context extracted from high energy particle collisions, the more likely we will be to fish out deviations or extensions to the Standard Model of Particle Physics. That drive forces us to pursue higher energy collisions through new accelerator programs and to leverage high integrated luminosity and detector technology for precision measurements.
At the same time, some conditions are simply not reproducible in collider environments. The Cosmic Neutrino Background was believed to be produced at roughly one second after the Big Bang, releasing highly relativistic relic neutrinos that go on to witness the entire history of universe through the present day. The neutrinos are so odd-ball with respect to the rest of the matter content of the Standard Model that there is every reason to believe that they have a unique story to tell.
A new experimental effort, called PTOLEMY, is an approach to neutrino mass sensitivity with high background suppression, high resolution differential energy measurements and scalability to targets that could eventually directly detect relic neutrinos. The new MgB2 superconducting spectrometer magnet produced by ASG/Suprasys is on its way to CERN in 2025 and then on to the LNGS to be the basis of the first demonstrator and neutrino mass measurement program with PTOLEMY.
There is a large complementarity between the neutrino program of KM3NeT and PTOLEMY physics. The KM3NeT observatories provide a window into the possible role of the Cosmic Neutrino Background in ultra-high energy cosmic rays and the mass constraints from precision oscillation measurements.
Publications
Brief Biography
Chris Tully earned his PhD in high-energy physics from Princeton University (*98) and his B.S. at Caltech (‘92). He is a professor of physics at Princeton University and has served as associate chair of the physics department. His research in particle physics spans three decades of energy-frontier particle colliders at Fermilab and CERN, and he was part of the team that discovered the Higgs boson at the LHC. He was awarded NSF, CERN, Sloan and IBM-Einstein Fellowships. He is the author of a popular textbook “Elementary Particle Physics in a Nutshell” and is a contributing author to “100 Years of Subatomic Physics.”