David Tucker-Smith

Assistant Professor of Physics

Education/Experience

• Amherst College: B.A. in physics, 1995
• University of California at Berkeley: Ph.D. in physics, 2001
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Postdoctoral Research Associate, 2001-2003

Contact information

• Office: Thompson Physical Laboratory 313
• Phone: (413) 597-3306
• E-mail: dtuckers@williams.edu

Courses taught 2003-2004

• Physics 141: Particles and Waves - Enriched
• Physics 418: Gravity

Research interests

The standard model of particle physics, which describes the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions of quarks and leptons, has been amazingly successful at explaining data from particle collider experiments. Yet it is regarded as an incomplete theory for a variety of reasons. One important reason is that the dynamics of the standard model tend to drive the scale of electroweak symmetry breaking to be very large, so that to explain the experimentally measured values of the W and Z gauge boson masses requires an extreme (and to many, unbelievable) fine-tuning among certain parameters of the theory. This apparent problem - called the hierarchy problem - has motivated some of the most promising extensions standard model. In my research I study the structure and phenomenology of these extensions. We don't know what new physics will emerge at higher energies to resolve the hierarchy problem, and so different extensions have vastly different features. One class of models incorporates a new symmetry relating fermions and bosons, called supersymmetry, and some theories even involve extra spacetime dimensions. Others simply offer a completely different picture of the Higgs sector, the part of the theory responsible for electroweak symmetry breaking, than that given in the standard model. One common ingredient is that theories that address the hierarchy problem almost always predict new physics that can be probed at energy scales accessible to future colliders, such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Most recently I have worked with my collaborators on grand unified theories with warped extra dimensions, which have a number of striking differences compared with four-dimensional unified theories. In particular, the ability to probe unification directly is improved in these models because the warped scenario predicts light states whose quantum numbers are characteristic of the unified symmetry, whereas in most four-dimensional theories these states are enormously heavy. I have also been interested in so-called "little Higgs" theories, a new class of models of electroweak symmetry breaking that casts the Higgs as a pseudo-Goldstone boson.

Selected publications

• Spectrum of TeV Particles in Warped Supersymmetric Grand Unification, Y. Nomura and D. Smith, Phys. Rev. D 68, 075003 (2003).
• Warped Supersymmetric Grand Unification, W. Goldberger, Y. Nomura, and D. Smith, Phys. Rev. D 67, 075021 (2003).
• Little Higgs Bosons from an Antisymmetric Condensate, I. Low, W. Skiba, and D. Smith, Phys. Rev. D 66, 072001 (2002).
• Localized Fermions and Anomaly Inflow via Deconstruction, W. Skiba and D. Smith, Phys. Rev. D 65, 095002 (2002).
• SO(10) Unified Theories in Six Dimensions, L.J. Hall,Y. Nomura, T. Okui, and D. Smith, Phys. Rev. D 65, 035008 (2002).
• Gauge-Higgs Unification in Higher Dimensions, L.J. Hall, Y. Nomura, and D. Smith, Nucl. Phys. B 639, 307 (2002).
• Finite Radiative Electroweak Symmetry Breaking from the Bulk, N. Arkani-Hamed, L.J. Hall, Y. Nomura, D. Smith, and N. Weiner, Nucl. Phys. B 605, 81 (2001).
• Inelastic Dark Matter, D. Smith and N. Weiner, Phys. Rev. D 64, 043502 (2001).
• Small Neutrino Masses from Supersymmetry Breaking, N. Arkani-Hamed, L.J. Hall, H. Murayama, D. Smith, and N. Weiner, Phys. Rev. D 64, 115011 (2001).
• Exponentially Small Supersymmetry Breaking from Extra Dimensions, N. Arkani-Hamed, L.J. Hall, D. Smith, and N. Weiner, Phys. Rev. D 63, 056003 (2001).
• Solving the Hierarchy Problem with Exponentially Large Dimensions, N. Arkani-Hamed, L.J. Hall, D. Smith, and N. Weiner, Phys. Rev. D 62, 105002 (2000).
• Flavor at the TeV Scale with Extra Dimensions, N. Arkani-Hamed, L.J. Hall, D. Smith, and N. Weiner, Phys. Rev. D 61, 116003 (2000).
• Cosmological Constraints on Large Extra Dimensions, L.J. Hall and D. Smith, Phys. Rev. D 60, 085008 (1999).
• Leading Order Textures for Lepton Mass Matrices, L.J. Hall and D. Smith, Phys. Rev. D 59, 113013 (1999).
• Oscillations of Atmospheric and Solar Neutrinos, R. Barbieri, L.J. Hall, D. Smith, A. Strumia, and N. Weiner, JHEP 9812, 017 (1998).