Ikaros Bigi

Research Interests

Prof. Bigi’s research has focused on refining the standard model phenomenology for the decays of hadrons carrying the quantum numbers strangeness, charm and beauty and on electric dipole moments to use them as ‘indirect’ searches for new physics. He is concentrating on rare weak decays and particle-antiparticle oscillations, in particular when CP invariance is broken. In 2001 the B factories in Stanford and Japan found the first CP violation outside K_L decays in B /to /psi K_S, as predicted by Sanda and Bigi in 1980. While CKM dynamics has been shown to provide at least the lion’s share of CP violation as observed in particle decays, it cannot drive baryogenesis. Thus new physics with CP violation has to exist. He has been advocating the construction of Super-Flavor Factories as envisioned in Japan and Italy. For precision studies of CP violation and rare decays of B and D mesons and of /tau leptons represent high sensitivity probes of the anticipated TeV scale new dynamics. He has been increasingly intrigued by theories with extra dimensions, since he views them as a sufficiently radical departure from conventional thinking that they might lead to novel insights into the flavour problem. In unguarded moments Prof. Bigi is thinking about limitations to quantum mechanics and worlds with more than one time dimension. Bigi is convinced that basic science needs a broader geographical distribution to continue flourishing. Therefore he has committed a significant amount of his time to support the evolution of high energy physics in `emerging countries.’