Ricerc@Sapienza

The Standard Model of fundamental interactions (SM) provides a unified description of electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions within the framework of gauge theories. In the last decades, the SM has proven incredibly successful in predicting a large variety of phenomena observed in experimental particle physics. Thanks to the great performances of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the SM picture has been completed by exploring particle physics up to energies at the TeV scale. The last missing particle of the SM, the Higgs boson - which is responsible for the generation of particle masses via the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking - has been discovered at the LHC. Its properties, still under accurate study, seem to correspond closely to the ones formulated in the sixties.

In spite of its success, many are the theoretical limitations of the SM and the questions it leaves open. Amongst them, the unexplained big number of input parameters, the values of masses and couplings that span order of magnitudes, the presence of massive neutrinos, the explanation of the origin of dark matter and baryon asymmetry. For such reasons, the SM is not considered to be the "fundamental" theory of elementary particle physics. It is generally believed to be an effective theory, substantially valid up to energies larger than those tested so far, which is the low-energy limit of a more fundamental theory, that could include gravity and describe physics up to the Planck scale.

Our research project wants to address some of these issues, getting insights in a variety of phenomena by using different strategies which correspond to the different expertises of the members of our group. In particular, our research will focus on: i) Flavour Physics within the SM and beyond; ii) Phenomenology and precision physics at colliders; iii) Exotic hadron spectroscopy; iv) Dark matter; v) Non-perturbative aspects of strong interactions.