Colloqium "The Quantum Universe" Hitoshi Murayama

Abstract

Where do we come from? Science is making progress on this age-old question of humankind. The universe was once much smaller than the size of an atom. Small things mattered in the small universe, where quantum physics dominated the scene. To understand the way the universe is today, we have to solve the remaining major puzzles. The higgs boson that was discovered during the last year is holding our body together from evaporating in a nanosecond. But we still do not know what it is exactly. The mysterious dark mater is holding the galaxy together, and we would not have been born without it. But nobody has seen it directly. And what is the very beginning of the universe?

Profile

Hitoshi Murayama, Director, Professor, UC Berkeley / Director & Project Professor Kavli IPMU, UTokyo

 < Academic Degrees>

• BS University of Tokyo 1986
• Ph.D. University of Tokyo 1991 

<Professional Appointments>

• Research Associate, Tohoku University 1991-1995
• Post-doctoral Fellow, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 1993-1995
• Assistant Professor, Department of Physics, UC, Berkeley 1995-1998
• Associate Professor, Department of Physics, UC, Berkeley1998-2000
• Professor, Department of Physics, UC, Berkeley 2000-present
• Director,Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, University of Tokyo 2007-present 

<Research Interests>

Phenomenology of particle collider experiments, neutrino physics, dark matter models, baryogenesis, inflation, models of physics beyond the standard model, dynamics of supersymmetric field theories, topological field theory. 

<Awards>

• Nishinomiya Yukawa Commemoration Prize in Theoretical Physics (2002)
• APS Fellow (2003)
• Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences