One of the leading themes of my research is the search for a solution to the so-called flavor puzzle. The ultimate goal would be an actual theory of what one may call the presently not understood "Periodic Table" of elementary particles.
As an Associate Researcher funded by FCT I recently joined the Centre for Theoretical Particle Physics at Instituto Superior Tecnico of the University of Lisbon. Previously I held postdoc positions in the Division for Particle and Astroparticle Physics at the Max-Planck-Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg and at the Bethe Center for Theoretical Physics of the University of Bonn. As a scientific visitor I spent several months each at UC Irvine and the Ohio State University.
I finished my PhD in 2016 at the Technical University of Munich under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Michael Ratz. During my studies I spent one year as a visiting exchange graduate student at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Research Assistant in the Precision Muon Group of Prof. David Hertzog
Research Assistant at TUM E18 in the group of Prof. Dr. Stephan Paul.
The most fundamental questions raised by the observation of Nature include the repetition of matter generations and their intergenerational mixing (the flavor puzzle), the apparent existence of large scale separation in Nature (the electroweak hierarchy problem), the reason for the accelerating expansion of the universe (the cosmological constant problem), the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe, as well as the question of what makes up the Dark Matter. Hints on possible solutions might come from experimental results that deviate from our theoretical expectations such as the strong CP problem, the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon (g-2), the cosmological Hubble tension or neutrino masses. On the other hand, it seems also very plausible that our current understanding and descriptions are incomplete, and we need some technical progress on the theory side to really resolve those puzzles.
Stuff that I have particularly worked on includes: (in no particular order; i really love to talk about all of these and more)
- The flavor puzzle, most recently our first entirely basis invariant formulation
- Explaining the electroweak hierarchy problem with conformal and custodial symmetry
- Distinguishing (or not?) Dirac and Majorana neutrinos by quantum statistics
- Having hypothetical spatial extra dimensions be cut-off by causal horizons and its observable consequences
- How one can tell compositeness of objects (read particles) from a distance, without requiring scattering experiments
- Origin of CP violation and the strong CP problem
- Non-Abelian discrete R-symmetries as flavor symmetries in supersymmetric GUTs
- Cosmic neutrino background and a potentially substantial non-thermal contribution
- Long-range neutrino self-interactions which could resolve the Hubble tension
- Unification of flavor symmetries, CP and modular transformations in string theory
- Gauge anomalies of discrete symmetries
- The cosmic neutrino background and the possibility of it undergoing condensation
- Violation of lepton flavor universality in B meson decays in a Standard Model extension with a 4th (vector-like) generation
- A systematic way to construct basis invariant quantities (involving group theory and algebraic invariant theory)
- Measuring the neutron's 2nd decay mode (Bound β-Decay — unobserved so far!), for spectroscopic access to neutrino properties
- The muon anomalous magnetic moment (g-2), in particular the effects of Hadronic Vacuum Polarization
- Outer automorphisms, which are literally "symmetries of symmetries" and their implications for particle physics - in all varieties