Dr. Laurel Stephenson Haskins

Dr. Stephenson Haskins earned her PhD in Physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As a high energy theoretical physicist, her goal is to understand the fundamental building blocks of nature. She works with phenomena that are outside of what is known as the Standard Model of particle physics. At UCSC, she proposed solutions to one of these phenomena—the strong CP problem, which refers to the fact that the strong force conserves the product of charge and parity symmetries (CP), even though, in principle, there is no reason that it should. At Hebrew U, where she has already joined the theoretical high energy physics group in the Racah Institute of Physics, she is working on another one of such phenomena, dark matter, whose composition remains mysterious even though it may comprise up to a quarter of the energy density in the universe. Because of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (near Geneva, Switzerland) and other developments, scientists believe that dark matter detection might actually be within reach. Theorists like Dr. Stephenson Haskins must explore many potential models in order to make predictions about detection, so they will have a framework in which to analyze emerging data.