Cari Cesarotti Receives 2024 Leona Woods Lectureship Award
High energy particle theorist and MIT postdoc probes possibility of 'a new machine for new physics'
November 27, 2024
The Physics Department at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory has named Cari Cesarotti, a postdoctoral theoretical particle physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for Theoretical Physics, one of the recipients of the 2024-2025 Leona Woods Distinguished Postdoctoral Lectureship Award. Cesarotti will give two talks about her work on Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2024, and Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.
The Leona Woods award was established in honor of renowned physicist Leona Woods to celebrate the scientific accomplishments of outstanding female physicists and physicists from underrepresented minority groups and to promote diversity and inclusion in the Physics Department.
“Cari has been a key contributor to the recent Snowmass process, a particle physics community planning exercise sponsored by the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society, which brought together the U.S. particle physics community to discuss the field's priorities over the next decade,” said Liza Brost, a physicist in the OMEGA group in the Physics Department and next year’s chair of the Leona Woods Lectureship Award Program. “In particular, her work generated excitement about the physics potential of a muon collider to explore the energy frontier.”
A muon collider: ‘Unchartered territory’
Cesarotti, who completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University before joining MIT and hails from the Chicago area, is a particle physicist working mostly in phenomenology beyond the Standard Model of physics.
Phenomenologists take abstract theoretical concepts and apply them to real-world data from experiments, like those conducted at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
Cesarotti describes the Standard Model of physics as a “catalogue” of fundamental, sub-atomic particles and forces — matter-carrying particles known as quarks and leptons, the force-carrying particles called bosons, and the Higgs boson — that make up all known matter.
“Theoretical physicists make predictions with this model, and they’re often correct based on what we’re finding in collider-based experiments around the world, like the LHC,” said Cesarotti.
But the Standard Model has its limitations. Questions remain. This is where scientists like Cesarotti come in.
“New physics are physics that are not explained by the Standard Model. New physics necessitate either new particles or new forces to exist at the fundamental level,” said Cesarotti. “I study and search for ways that we can find new physics or new dynamics primarily through colliders but also with other experiments.”
For the past few years, Cesarotti has been swept up with understanding scientists’ future direction experimentally since the discovery of the Higgs Boson, a target that provided a clear presence of what an experiment could go after.
“We need to decide as a field what we do next, especially given that we don’t have as clear of an indication as we did when we built the LHC,” said Cesarotti. “How do we proceed as a community? Where are we going to look? What are we going to value in terms of our science program and particle physics? And then, how do we build an experiment that’s able to probe these specific questions that we want to understand?”
To address these questions, Cesarotti has dedicated her time as a postdoc to calculating projections to understand the physics potential of building a new machine for new physics — a muon collider.
Muons — one of the subatomic particles that make up the lepton group — are about 200 times heavier than electrons, have the same charge, and can travel far when they travel fast — about the speed of light — before quickly decaying. They also lose a lot more power than electrons would, given the same collider set up.
“Muons pose a lot of new, interesting technological challenges, especially on the accelerator side,” said Cesarotti, who notes that, while scientists have made jumps in understanding the feasibility of such a machine, they’ve never shown that this technology is even possible at the scale of a collider.
“What’s really special about a muon collider is that you can go to higher energies, higher than what we see at the LHC. And you can do it in a much smaller footprint machine,” said Cesarotti, who describes herself as a "foot soldier" in this endeavor.
“This is absolutely unchartered territory," she said. "This is a machine that shifts the way in which we think about collider physics. And we will need this new technology if we want to keep pushing the energy frontier."
The growing interest in muon colliders is deeply tied to Brookhaven Lab, largely because of physicist Robert Palmer, whose extensive work in developing a muon collider concept over many years led to the first complete design efforts in the 2000s. Additionally, the Lab’s Mark Palmer, who directed the Muon Accelerator Program, laid the groundwork for current design concepts.
‘We have come really far’
“My favorite thing to do in the world is to learn and really understand something well,” said Cesarotti, who credits her high school physics teacher with igniting her curiosity and suggesting life-changing books like The Lightness of Being by MIT Professor Frank Wilczek, who recently gave Cesarotti his autograph. “My mother, a chemist, always said she hated physics, so that was my teenage rebellion,” joked Cesarotti. “Also, I love calculating stuff.”
In regard to receiving the Leona Woods Award, Cesarotti said, “It makes me feel very proud to be a part of work that people acknowledge. The more meaningful part of the award is that people in the [scientific] community value the conclusions that the muon collider community are making and our work. We have come far as a collaboration.”
Cesarotti also credits the younger members of the collaboration for bringing energy, motivation, and a sense of belonging and inclusion in the scientific community.
“They have vision. It is a younger person’s game, this three-decade endeavor. These are the people who will carry the project to the finish line.”
About the talks
On Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2024, at 3:30 p.m. EST, Cesarotti will give the Leona Woods Colloquium talk, “The Physics Potential of a Future Muon Collider.” The talk is available in person for Brookhaven Lab employees only in the Large Seminar Room in building 510. The public and Lab employees may attend the talk online on Zoom.
Cesarotti will also give the Leona Woods Awardee talk, “Hitting the Thermal Target with Leptophilic Dark Matter,” on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024, at 11 a.m EST. The talk is available in person for Brookhaven Lab employees only in the Small Seminar Room in building 510.
About the award
The Leona Woods Distinguished Postdoctoral Lectureship Award, established in 2017, is named for Leona Woods, one of the small number of female physicists who contributed to the Manhattan Project and who later served as a visiting physicist at Brookhaven Lab from 1958 to 1962. Leona Woods Lectureship awardees are selected twice a year.
The award was established to celebrate the achievements of women and minority physicists and to highlight the diversity of the scientific community.
The award committee chooses the winners based both on their scientific excellence and their commitment to service in their communities, whether mentoring younger colleagues or providing teaching and guidance to younger students.
Nominees must be within seven years of earning their doctoral degree and have achievements in broadly defined areas of interest to the Brookhaven Lab Physics Department. These include astrophysics, cosmology, and experimental, theoretical, nuclear, or high energy physics.
To submit nominations, visit the Leona Woods Distinguished Postdoctoral Lectureship Award website.
Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.
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