UC Berkeley

The much anticipated era of the Large Hadron Collider is nally upon us, making today an extremely interesting time to be doing theoretical particle physics. The recent Higgs-like signal is certainly the most exciting particle physics discovery in decades. However with this discovery comes the reminder that we are now, more than ever, in need of theoretical work to understand new physics. The Standard Model is incomplete; it does not accommodate the experimental observation of dark matter, or the baryon asymmetry of the Universe. In addition, the SM has aesthetic or ne-tuning problems, like the gauge hierarchy problem and the strong CP problem. The task of model builders centers around addressing these and other issues by constructing new physics models that may be tested experimentally.