Welcome to the Institute for Theoretical Physics (ITP)

Quick-Links: Lectures, Bachelor's and Master's Theses, Completed PhD Theses, Research and Applications.

The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics describes our basic understanding of the building blocks of matter and how they interact with each other. It is an extremely successful theory that is able to describe particle physics phenomena from the scale of electroweak symmetry breaking all the way up to the Planck scale. With the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 - 48 years after its first postulation - the SM has been made structurally complete. Numerous high-precision experiments have tested the SM at the quantum level. Still, there are problems that cannot be explained within the SM, such as the nature of Dark Matter or the generation of the baryon-antibaryon asymmetry. This situation calls for new physics extensions beyond the SM, entailing new particles and interactions implying new signatures to be studied at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN or future e+e- and hadron colliders.

The research at the Institute of Theoretical Physics (ITP) is centered around theoretical particle physics. Our aim is to improve our understanding of nature by making high-precision predictions for observables to be tested at present and future high-energy colliders, both for the SM and new physics extensions beyond the SM. This effort is supported by the development of Monte Carlo algorithms to understand the production at the hadronic level. On the gravitational side, we explore connections of new physics to the phenomenology of black holes. The research at ITP is complemented by analyses of fundamental aspects of quantum field theory, in particular gauge field theory, and by investigations of the structure of spacetime and the cosmological constant problem.

Members of the ITP also work very closely with the research groups in theoretical (astro-)particle physics at the Institute for Astroparticle Physics (IAP).