Short biography
Geraldine Servant got her PhD in 2001 from University Paris 11 for theoretical research in high energy physics conducted at CEA Saclay and McGill University in Montreal. After 3 postdoc years at the University of Chicago she returned to CEA Saclay on a permanent position and eventually moved to CERN's Theory group in 2006, first as a Fellow and then as an ERC grant holder (07/2008-06/2013).
She has worked on models of new physics at the TeV scale and their phenomenology at the LHC, with special emphasis for cosmological consequences like the nature of the electroweak phase transition in the early universe and dark matter model building.
She joined ICREA at IFAE in October 2012. Research interests
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is taking experiments into a new energy domain beyond the Standard Model of strong and electroweak interactions. A major direction of my research is on the LHC-cosmology interplay, in particular on the dark matter and the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe.
The two leading candidates for dark matter are
Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) which are thermal relics and are being searched at the LHC, and axions which, in contrast, are way too weakly interacting to be produced at collider experiments.
Before becoming a popular dark matter candidate, the axion was originally introduced to explain the non-observation of an electric dipole moment for the neutron.
In this last year, I have shown that the dynamics of the axion during a delayed electroweak phase transition could explain the observed asymmetry in the context of cold baryogenesis. Such a scenario will be testable at the next run of the LHC. Key words
High Energy Physics, Cosmology, Astroparticles