Probing the foundations of nature

Understanding matter at its smallest scales

The group of Prof. Dr. Michael Spannowsky is based at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany. We are affiliated with the Institute of Theoretical Physics (ITP) and the Institute for Quantum Materials and Technologies (IQMT). We study how collider experiments can test the Standard Model and search for new physics, both through direct particle production and through deviations in known processes. Effective field theory provides a systematic description of these deviations without requiring a specific model of their origin. We develop this framework and investigate which effects current and future colliders could measure.

We develop machine-learning methods that incorporate the symmetries of particle physics to improve performance with compact networks. We also study quantum machine learning and investigate how ideas from quantum information can improve the performance of large classical models. Our work on simulation spans quantum computing methods for particle showers and vacuum decay, as well as tensor-network approaches to quantum field theory. Across these directions, we use the physics of each problem to guide how we build and apply our methods.