The central objective of all particle physics research is to understand the fundamental interactions of the basic forms of matter and their ultimate structure. The high energy theory group's activity centers on a quantum-field-theoretical study of these interactions, with specific emphasis on gauge field theories, which are indispensable for the description of all interactions.

Professor Ngee Pong Chang has studied in recent years the chiral phase transitions in QCD at high temperatures, pointing out the subtleties and differences between chiral symmetry breaking at zero temperature and at high temperatures. At high temperatures, there is a second order transition to a new symmetry breaking phase where nevertheless the QCD pion becomes strictly massless. Professor Chang's research has also included work on the cosmological constant problem, with the first models of no-scale supergravity. He was also the first to apply bifurcation theory to quantum field theory, providing a new tool for the study of dynamical symmetry breaking. Lately, he has been investigating the majorana nature of the neutrino.

Professor Michio Kaku's research is in the general area of high-energy theory and general relativity. He investigates problems of supersymmetry and attempts at unification of all known particle interactions with supergravity and superstrings. Other specific problems he is studying include the field theory of superstrings, superconformal gravity, lattice gravity, and lattice supersymmetry.

Professor V. Parameswaran Nair's work has generally been on the mathematical and topological aspects of quantum field theory and how these apply to elementary particle physics. He has worked on Skyrmions, quantum breaking of classical symmetries, conformal and topological field theories, theories of anyons (particles of fractional spin), black holes and on the geometry of the configuration space for gauge theories. His current interests include the quark-gluon plasma, quantum chromodynamics, and noncommutative geometry.

Professor Alexios Polychronakos' research is on theoretical aspects of quantum field theory and many-body physics. He has worked on quantum properties of field theoretical solitons, integrable models of particles and spin chains, topological and low-dimensional field theory, properties of cosmic strings and black holes, generalized quantum statistics (parastatistics, anyons) and the quantum Hall effect, quantum groups, generalizations of fluid mechanics and noncommutative field theory. His current work focuses on higher-dimensional bosonization and the fluid dynamics of particles with spin and color.