Professor Reinhard Alkofer

The primary focus of the research in our group is the physics of strongly-interacting gauge theories. To explore these kind of quantum field theories we employ continuum methods, in particular, functional methods.

Current research projects include:

• Physics of light and heavy mesons, in particular, production mechanisms, decays,  time-like form factors and isospin breaking effects, from Poincaré-covariant quark-antiquark bound state equations;
• Unquenched  QCD vertex functions in Landau gauge calculated in continuum quantum field theory with functional methods;
• Time-dependence of electron-positron pair production in ultra-strong laser fields (Sauter-Schwinger effect in strong-field quantum electrodynamics) from the Dirac-Heisenberg-Wigner formalism;
• Ultraviolet completion of the Standard Model via a minimally parameterization of New Physics in the Renormalization Group equations; and
• Dirac fermions and torsion in Einstein-Cartan gravity, including the unimodular version of Einstein-Cartan gravity,  and their impact of the quark condensate on the cosmological constant.