Stephen M. Barr's Personal Website
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Welcome to my personal webpage.

MY PROFESSION
I am a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Delaware. Here is My University of Delaware webpage   

MY PHYSICS RESEARCH INTERESTS: My field of research is theoretical particle physics. 
 For my physics research papers see here.  For more about my physics career see the page on this site called My CV

My particular areas of expertise are grand unified theories, theories of CP violation, theories of neutrino masses and mixing,
                                                 and particle cosmology, especially theories of baryogenesis and dark matter.  When I was elected  a Fellow of the American 
                                                 Physical Society in 2011, the citation read "for original contributions to grand unified theories, CP violation, and baryogenesis".)
                                                 I wrote the article on "Grand Unified Theories" for the Encyclopedia of Physics.

                                                 Grand unified theories (or "GUTs") are theories that give a unified mathematical description of the three non-gravitational forces, 
                                                 namely the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions.  My most well-known contributions to GUTs are co-discovering
                                                 (and naming) the Flipped SU(5) scheme of unification, and analyzing (in a paper with K.S. Babu) the problems associated 
                                                 with constructing realistic supersymmetric grand unified models based on the group SO(10).  

                                                 CP Violation is a very active field of research in particle physics. CP is a symmetry that relates particles of one handedness to 
                                                 antiparticles  of the opposite handedness.  That sounds esoteric, but CP symmetry and its violation runs like a golden thread 
                                                 through many key unsolved  problems of particle physics. CP symmetry is equivalent to "time reversal symmetry" (T) because 
                                                 of the CPT theorem. So CP violation implies that the laws of physics are not past-future symmetric. CP violation is also required
                                                 if processes in the early universe were to generate the present excess of matter over antimatter, as was shown by the famous
                                                 Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov.  CP violation also has to do with whether elementary particles have electric dipole moments.
                                                 My most significant contributions to the study of CP violation were the discovery of the Barr-Zee diagram, which generates electric
                                                 dipole moments for the electron, the neutron, and other particles in many theoretical models, and the Nelson-Barr mechanism,
                                                 which is an idea for solving the "Strong CP Problem", i.e. why the strong interaction seems to be CP symmetric, even though
                                                 the weak interactions are not. 

                                                 Baryogenesis is the process by which matter came to dominate over antimatter in the early universe. . A paper I wrote in 1990
                                                 with R.S. Chivukula and E. Farhi has recently attracted much attention. In it we showed how "dark matter" and ordinary ("baryonic")
                                                 matter can have been generated by the same processes in the early universe.  This was also one of the first papers to
                                                 study the possibility of "asymmetric dark matter".  


                                                 SCIENCE AND RELIGION  In addition to my profession of research and teaching in physics, I also have written
                                     and lectured extensively on the relation of science and religion.  I am a believing and practicing Catholic, though my 
                                     writing in the area of science and religion has been well-received by Protestants and Jews. I was elected to the 
                                     Academy of Catholic Theology in 2010, and was awarded the Benemerenti Medal in 2007, a papal award giiven
                                     for service to the Church. I am a member of the editorial Advisory Council of First Things magazine, a leading religious
                                     intellectual journal that was founded by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, and for which many prominent Catholics, Protestants,
                                     Eastern Orthodox Christians, and Jews write. I have written many articles and book reviews for First Things since 1995. 
                                     I have also written articles and book reviews for National Review, The Weekly Standard, Modern Age, The Public Interest, 
                                     Commonweal, and other publication. I have lectured widely on the relation of science and religion, having spoken so
                                     far in 23 states, the District of Columbia, two Canadian provinces, and China, mostly on university campuses, but also
                                     at churches and synagogues.  I have been interviewed on radio and television (here is a half-hour  interview I gave on 
                                     EWTN)

                                     My main written work on science and religion is the book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith. 


  

                                                 
                                              


My wikipedia page


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