Vernon Barger

Vernon Barger is a Vilas Research Professor and Van Vleck Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on collider physics phenomenology, unified models, Higgs bosons, supersymmetry, neutrino physics, and cosmology. He leads the Phenomenology research group at UW-Madison, contributing to theoretical frameworks and experimental predictions for particle physics colliders like the LHC.

His work bridges high-energy physics, cosmology, and astrophysics, with a particular emphasis on supersymmetric models, naturalness criteria, and dark matter implications. Recent efforts include exploring axion dark matter in supersymmetric contexts, testing anomaly-mediated SUSY breaking, and analyzing Higgs boson properties in hidden sector scenarios.

Publications emphasize collider signatures for SUSY particles, such as gluinos, squarks, staus, and winos, as well as cosmological implications of string-inspired models. Barger collaborates on Snowmass reports and guides experimental strategies for future colliders like the high-luminosity LHC and proposed 100 TeV hadron colliders.

His research also addresses tensions between cosmological measurements and particle physics models, including dark radiation scenarios and anthropic solutions to moduli problems. Ongoing work includes refining SUSY parameter spaces from landscape predictions and probing top Yukawa couplings at the LHC.