Peter Arnold
( Email - Website )
Professor
Department of Physics
PO Box 400714
Physics Building, 320
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4714
Phone:434-924-6813
Education and Experiences:
(BA) Harvard University
(PhD) Stanford University
Interests:
A unifying theme to much of my work over the past few years has been to understand why there is significantly more matter than anti-matter in the universe. This fact, and the amount of matter in the universe today, is potentially explainable in terms of what is currently known, or will be known after another decade or two of accelerator experiments, about the weak forces responsible for nuclear beta decay. The generation of the matter/anti-matter asymmetry may take place in a violent first-order phase transition one billionth of a second after the Big Bang. The physics that must be understood both qualitatively and quantitatively includes: the phase transition diagram for the weak forces, bubble nucleation and growth during cosmological phase transitions, the physics of ultrarelativistic plasmas, and the mysterious violation of apparent symmetries of nature by the quantization of field theory. I have a general interest in quantum field theory at very high temperatures and in non-perturbative phenomena in the weak interactions. In my past, I have also been known to occasionally make perturbative QCD calculations of direct relevance to accelerator experiments.
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