Theoretical Physics Division of Particles and Fields

Division head: Associate prof. dr. sc. Maro Cvitan

Deputy division head: Associate prof. dr. sc. Ivica Smolić

 

Research subjects

1. Gravitation and black holes

Theoretical investigations General research on parity violating effects in gravity by studying holography, anomalies, entropy, black holes. The focus is in particular on the natural candidates for parity violating gravity interactions – the Chern-Simons terms, both pure gravitational and mixed gauge-gravitational ones - using extra-dimension models such as those inspired by the string theory. The expected outcome is a significant increase in understanding the consequences of parity violating gravitational interactions, not only in relation with possible CP violations, but also for other effects, e.g. for corrections to black hole entropy.

Also, research on general properties of classical scalar and electromagneticfield in a curved spacetime: question of symmetry inheritance and the interaction between the fields and black holes.

 

2. Phenomenology of elementary particles and fields

Goal of this research is to study the fundamental strong force, as described by the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and physical processes happening at hadron accelerators, including electroweak production of as-yet-unseen particles at the large hadron collider (LHC). Thereby, we investigate models of new physics in which such new particles are introduced in attempts to explain neutrino masses and abundance of dark matter in the universe. To achieve these objectives we study specific hadronic processes, both in the high-energy regime where strong force is weak enough for perturbative approach, as well as in regimes where non-perturbative features of QCD, such as confinement and chiral symmetry breaking come to the fore. Our focus is on processes measured by the range of experimental collaborations which  facilitates close contact with reality and immediate testing of our results and ideas.