Research Expertise and Interest

particle physics

Research Description

The discovery of a Higgs boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations testifies to the success of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. However, the Standard Model does not address fundamental questions such as: Why is gravity so much weaker than electroweak force? What is the nature of Dark Matter? Why is there an imbalance between matter and anti-matter in the universe? Experimental observations have indicated that the Standard Model is likely to be an effective theory at low energy and new physics phenomena may appear at the TeV-scale accessible by the LHC.

We live in an exciting time for particle physics. The excellent performance of the current LHC as well as the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) upgrade, allow us to confront those fundamental questions with a large and ever increasing data set. The long awaited discovery of Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) physics may well be right around the corner. Currently, his research is focused on discovering new physics phenomena at the LHC. Specifically, his research program will probe BSM physics by precision measurement and testing of the Standard Model in the Higgs sector and by direct searches for signals of a broad spectrum of well motivated BSM models. To further exploit the physics potential of the LHC, he is also contributing to the upgrade of the ATLAS detector for the upcoming HL-LHC. 

Wang is a member of the Berkeley LBNL ATLAS group, which consists of two other UC faculty members, Professors Gray and Shapiro, over a dozen staff scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, many postdoctoral researchers, UC graduate students, undergraduate students and visitors. 

Haichen Wang received a B.S. in Physics from Peking University in 2007, and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. His Ph.D. thesis was about the discovery of the Higgs boson using data collected by the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. He was an Owen Chamberlain fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 2013 to 2018 before joining the Physics Department in January 2019.