Yuhsin Tsai, a high energy theorist, is joining the faculty this month in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Physics.
Tsai, the Tom and Carolyn Marquez Assistant Professor of Physics, completed his postdoctoral research this year at the Maryland Center for Fundamental Physics. His research is at the intersection between cosmology – the study of the origin of the universe from its beginning to about 10 billion years – and experimental, high-energy particle physics, which is conducted using particle colliders.
“More recently there has been a focus on how to use the universe as a laboratory to study particle physics,” he said, adding that there are many limits to conducting particle research on earth because of the size of colliders needed, and various other constraints. “But almost all of the information (in the form of particles) from the early universe got destroyed, so it’s my job to identify all the possible signals that were not destroyed by thermal fluctuation.”
Tsai is looking forward to working with others in the particle physics and cosmology groups at Notre Dame, including Professor Peter Garnavich, chair of the department; professors Antonio Delgado, Christopher Kolda, and Grant Mathews, Associate Professor Adam Martin, and postdoctoral researchers.
He’s heard good comments the work ethic of undergraduate students at Notre Dame as well.
“Even though I have not been teaching recently, I’m really looking forward to interacting with the students,” Tsai said.
Tsai has written several papers about dark matter, neutrino cosmology, and gravitational waves. He graduated with his bachelor’s degree from National Tsing-Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan, and earned his doctoral degree from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He has been a fellow at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California in Davis.