Modern Trends in Particle Physics

a Conference in Honor of Pran Nath

Speakers

Info

Schedule

Boston

Nath

Speakers


  • Ignatios Antoniadis, (Paris, LPTHE & U. Bern, AEC), Inflation from Supersymmetry Breaking
  • Kaladi Babu, (Oklahoma State University), Confronting unified theories with nucleon decay and neutrino oscillations
  • Marcela Carena, (Fermilab & UChicago, EFI & UChicago, KICP), TBA
  • Ali Chamseddine, (AUB, Beirut and Radboud University, Nijmegen), Mimetic Gravity
  • Mirjam Cvetic, (University of Pennsylvania) Landscape of globally consistent three-family Standard Models in F-theory
  • Michael Dine, (University of California, Santa Cruz), Hierarchy of Hierarchies
  • Liam Fitzpatrick, (Boston University), Conformal Bootstrap and Quantum Field Theory
  • Richard Gaitskell, (Brown University), Current and Future Directions for Direct Dark Matter Detection
  • S. James Gates, Jr., (Brown University), Breitenlohner’s M-Theory Magic Carpet
  • James Hirschauer, (Fermilab), SUSY Searches at LHC
  • Steve King, (University of Southampton), Grand Unified Theories of Flavour
  • Andrei Linde, (Stanford University), Inflation after Planck 2018
  • Fernando Quevedo, (ICTP, Trieste & Cambridge University, DAMTP), Pre and Post Inflation in String Theory
  • Cumrun Vafa, (Harvard University), A Swampland Update
  • Carlos Wagner, (UChicago, EFI & UChicago, KICP & Argonne), Supersymmetry and LHC Physics
  • Lian-Tao Wang, (UChicago, EFI & UChicago, KICP), Future Colliders

Organizing committee: Jim Halverson, Brent Nelson, Toyoko Orimoto, and Tomasz Taylor (chair). For questions, please contact us.

Information

To register, please fill out this form.

On the evening of May 17 we will be having a banquet. The cost is $100 and can be paid here. Meal selection is available on the registration form. Banquet selection and fee must be paid by May 10.

The conference poster can be found here

A map of conference locations:

Conference Map

Conference Location: 102 West Village G, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston.

Schedule

All talks will be in 102 West Village G, Northeastern Universty.

Friday, May 17

Saturday, May 18

Boston

Northeastern University is situated on Huntington Avenue in downtown Boston, in close proximity to historical and modern amenities, as well as a number of excellent hotels and restaurants. While ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft are ubiquitous, Boston’s public transportation service, known as the T, is also efficient and quite inexpensive. An organizer-curated selection of hotels, transportation options, restaurants, and outings are below.

Hotel

The participants are expected to make their own hotel arrangements. Hotels in the vicinity tend to be rather expensive. Airbnb offers apartments at a variety of price ranges in the many Boston neighborhoods. The South End and Back Bay are neighborhoods with short walks from Northeastern, and downtown, Brookline, and Jamaica Plain are easily accessed via the subway.

Parking

Garage parking is available in the Renaissance Garage or the Gainsborough Garage.

Transportation

The T is run by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which provides all T maps and schedules. In practice, locals often use Google Maps for T directions, which are accurate both for routes and timing.

T stops near Northeastern include:

  • Northeastern, a Green line stop on Huntington Avenue.
  • Ruggles, an Orange line stop on Forsyth Street.

Relevant downtown T stops include:

  • Arlington, a Green line stop at the Boston Public Garden, in between Copley Square and the Boston Common.
  • Haymarket, an Orange line stop near Boston’s historic North End.
  • Downtown Crossing, an Orange line stop in the heart of downtown. Transfer here for service to MIT and Harvard.

Uber and Lyft drivers are typically available for pickup within five minutes, providing an alternative to the T.

Restaurants

A selection of restaurants near Northeastern for dinner include:

  • Toro, a Barcelona-style tapas restaurant in Boston’s South End.
  • Five Horses, a South End gastropub with many local microbrews.
  • Symphony Sushi, five minutes from campus, inexpensive and excellent.
  • Thaitation, Thai cuisine in the Fenway neighborhood.
  • Squealing Pig, a Mission Hill gastropub.
  • El Centro Mexican, Mexican cuisine in the South End.

While some of the above are suitable for lunch as well, some quicker options include:

Additional options can be found on Huntingtown Avenue, in the directions of Massachusetts Avenue.

Outings

Though our conference is short and the days will be busy, natural outings for the interested participant include:

  • Boston Common and Boston Public Garden, two famous adjacent parks in the heart of downtown.
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s premier art museum, directly across the street from Northeastern.
  • JFK Museum, celebrating the life and work of native Bostonian and America’s 35th President, John F. Kennedy.
  • The Freedom Trail, a 2.5-mile-long path through downtown Boston that passes many historical sites significant to the American Revolution.
  • The North End, Boston’s oldest residential neighborhood known for revolution era events, as well as its fine Italian restaurants.

Pran Nath

The conference is in honor of Pran Nath, Mathews Distinguished University Professor of Physics, for his pioneering contributions in the field of high energy theory spanning six decades. Professor Nath is co- author, with Richard Arnowitt and Bruno Zumino, of the first supergravity theory formulated in superspace. He is co-author of supergravity grand unification with Ali Chamseddine and Arnowitt. Since the low energy limit of strings is supergravity, supergravity grand unification provides a bridge to string theory and the work of Nath and collaborators has a wide range of applicability from the electroweak scale to the grand unification scale and even up to the string scale. His work has influenced the search for supersymmetry at colliders such as ATLAS and CMS at CERN, high precision experiments such as the Brookhaven experiment on the muon anomalous moment, experiments searching for dark matter, and proton stability experiments at superKamiokande.

Among his many contributions, Prof. Nath worked on the development of the effective Lagrangian approach for hard pion physics in the mid sixties, where the existence of an effective Lagrangian was deduced from general principles such as locality, Lorentz invariance, single particle saturation and spectator approximation and thus the effective Lagrangian approach is valid from the electroweak scale up to the Planck scale. He was also one of the first to propose the existence of the axial vector anomaly to solve the two photon decay of the neutral pion using effective Lagrangians. Later in the early eighties he addressed the U(1) axial anomaly problem, and a solution to this puzzle was given in his work with Arnowitt contemporaneous to the work of Di Vecchia and Veneziano, of Rosenzweig, Schechter, Trahern, and of Witten. In recent works he has proposed exploration of the hidden sector of supergravity and strings using the Stueckelberg mass mixing as U(1) probes, which allows for detection of hidden sector dark matter. Currently he is working on the interface of particle physics and cosmology.

Recently he has penned the book “Supersymmetry, Supergravity, and Unification” published by Cambridge University Press (2016) which gives a comprehensive view of developments in particle physics and gravity over the past several decades. He is the founding chair of the “Particles, Strings and Cosmology Symposium”, and the “Supersymmetry and Unification of Fundamental Interactions conference ”, which are two of the leading conferences in their respective areas held annually. Prof. Nath received his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1964, taught at the University of California at Riverside in 1965, and was an Andrew Mellon Fellow at at the University of Pittsburgh in 1966. Since 1966 he has been at Northeastern University where he is Mathews University Distinguished Professor since 1991.