Faculty

Tracing how planets form and evolve with direct imaging, spectroscopy, dynamics, and variability.

I’m an observational astronomer with expertise in high-redshift galaxies. I use the most massive and unusual galaxies at early times to test fundamental properties of galaxy assembly (including their gas, stars, and dust) within a ΛCDM cosmological framework.

High Energy Physics, Particle Phenomenology, Cosmology

Quantum gravity, Quantum Field Theory, Black Holes, Quantum Cosmology, Elementary Particles

High Energy Physics, Quantum Field Theory, String Theory

His research focus is in quantum gravity, superstring theory, quantum field theory, and particle physics, specifically related to strongly coupled phenomena.

Research Topics: Pattern formation in soft matter and fluids mechanics. Finding governing equations of complex systems from data using machine learning.

In my career, I have focused on designing and building novel particle detectors and then using those detectors to search for new phenomena.  The physics topics I have investigated include the lifetime and time evolution of the bottom, strange, and charm quarks, including matter-antimatter asymmetries, in experiments at SLAC, CERN, and Cornell.  For the past 2 decades, I have focused on seeking signals from dark matter with detectors deployed in underground laboratories, including those at Stanford, Soudan, Minnesota, and SURF in South Dakota, using the CDMS, LUX, and LZ experiments.

Cyrus R. Safinya is a Distinguished Professor of Materials at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His home department is Materials in the College of Engineering and he has joint appointments in the Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology department, and by courtesy, in the Physics department and the Biomolecular Science and Engineering Program.

Sagar Vijay graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor's degree in physics in 2013, and received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018.  He was subsequently a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, before joining  UCSB’s physics department in 2020.  He is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship, and the 2023 William L. McMillan Award for outstanding contributions to condensed matter physics.

Applications of Quantum Field Theory in Physics and Biophysics