Witold Skiba is a Polish theoretical physicist and Professor of Physics at Yale University. His research focuses on particle physics beyond the Standard Model, including supersymmetry breaking, little Higgs models, effective field theory, and the conformal bootstrap.
Education and career Skiba studied physics at the University of Warsaw before moving to the United States for graduate school. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997 with a thesis titled Strong dynamics in theories beyond the standard model, supervised by Lisa Randall. He subsequently held postdoctoral positions at MIT and the University of California, San Diego. In 2002, Skiba joined the Yale University Department of Physics as an assistant professor. He was later promoted to associate professor and then to full professor. He is a member of the Yale Particle Theory Group.
Research Skiba's research spans several areas of theoretical particle physics.
Dynamical supersymmetry breaking During his doctoral and early postdoctoral work in the mid-1990s, Skiba contributed to the understanding of dynamical supersymmetry breaking. With Csaba Csáki and Lisa Randall, he introduced new classes of theories that dynamically break supersymmetry through confining and dual theory gauge dynamics. He also authored a review of mechanisms of dynamical supersymmetry breaking.
Little Higgs models Skiba made significant contributions to the development of little Higgs models, which address the hierarchy problem in particle physics by treating the Higgs boson as a pseudo-Nambu–Goldstone boson. With Ian Low and David Tucker-Smith, he constructed the SU(6)/Sp(6) little Higgs model, in which the Higgs doublets arise as pseudo-Goldstone bosons with masses protected from one-loop quadratic divergences. With John Terning, he constructed a little Higgs model based on SU(9)/SU(8) that yields a two-Higgs-doublet model at the electroweak scale. With David E. Kaplan and Martin Schmaltz, he developed an ultraviolet extension of the simplest little Higgs model.
Effective field theory and precision electroweak physics Skiba has worked extensively on using effective field theory techniques to constrain physics beyond the Standard Model. With Zhenyu Han, he obtained bounds on arbitrary linear combinations of dimension-six operators in the Standard Model from a comprehensive fit to precision electroweak data. He applied these results to constrain little Higgs models. He delivered the TASI lectures on effective field theory and precision electroweak measurements in 2009. With Walter Goldberger and Benjamin Grinstein, he studied how to distinguish the Higgs boson from a dilaton (the pseudo-Goldstone boson of conformal symmetry breaking) at the Large Hadron Collider.
Conformal field theory and the conformal bootstrap Since the mid-2010s, Skiba has developed a systematic program for computing conformal blocks using the embedding space formalism, in a long-running collaboration with Jean-François Fortin at Université Laval. They showed how to obtain conformal blocks from embedding space using the operator product expansion, demonstrating that all conformal blocks are derivatives of a minimal scalar-exchange block. They subsequently developed a conformal differential operator in embedding space, new methods for conformal correlation functions, and computed higher-point conformal blocks including six-point blocks in multiple topological channels. This body of work has led to a complete framework for implementing the conformal bootstrap program directly in embedding space, including tensorial generalizations of conformal blocks and bootstrap equations for operators in arbitrary Lorentz representations. More recently, Skiba and collaborators have obtained new expressions for Virasoro conformal blocks using the inverse Shapovalov form.
Awards and honors Department of Energy Outstanding Junior Investigator (OJI) Award (2003), for "Physics at the TeV Scale and Beyond" Invited lecturer, Theoretical Advanced Study Institute (TASI), University of Colorado Boulder (2009) Simons Fellowship in Theoretical Physics, Simons Foundation (2013)
References
External links Official website Yale Particle Theory Group Witold Skiba on INSPIRE-HEP Publications on arXiv
