José Ramón Espinosa

Institut de Física d'Altes Energies (IFAE)

Experimental Sciences & Mathematics

I obtained my PhD (UAM 1994) working on Particle Physics beyond the Standard Model at IEM (CSIC, Madrid) under the supervision of Mariano Quirós. After postdoctoral stays at DESY (Hamburg, Germany), University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, USA) and CERN (Geneva, Switzerland), in 1999 I joined IMAFF (CSIC, Madrid) and then IFT-UAM/CSIC (Madrid) with a permanent position as 'Científico Titular' being promoted to 'Investigador Científico' in 2005 and to 'Profesor de Investigación' in 2008. In November of that year I joined ICREA as Research Professor to work at IFAE.


Research interests

The ultimate goal of my field of research, Particle Physics, is to understand nature at the most fundamental level determining its building blocks and the laws that govern them. In the path (of ever increasing energies) towards that goal, the Standard Model -the theory that describes how all phenomena observed so far can be explained in terms of a small number of particle species interacting according to a well defined mathematical framework- stands as an impressive achievement. In spite of this, it leaves open too many questions to be considered the ultimate theory, and strong reasons lead us to believe in physics beyond this Standard Model. As a theorist, I work at this high energy frontier exploring what theories might supersede the Standard Model and what experimental implications they would have. The Large Hadron Collider now in operation at CERN and a number of other experiments will provide us in coming years with crucial data to guide research in this fundamental field.

Selected publications

– Cacciari M, Del Debbio L, Espinosa JR, Polosa AD & Testa M 2016, ‘A note on the fate of the Landau-Yang theorem in non-Abelian gauge theories’, Physics Letters B 753, pp 476-481.

Espinosa JR, Fortin J-F & Trepanier M 2016, ‘Consistency of scalar potentials from quantum de Sitter space’, Physical Review D, 93, 12, 124067.

Espinosa JR, Garny M & Konstandin T 2016, ‘Interplay of infrared divergences and gauge dependence of the effective potential’, Physical Review D, 94, 5, 055026.

– Casas JA, Espinosa JR & Moreno JM 2016, ‘The 750 GeV Diphoton Excess as a First Light on Supersymmetry Breaking’, Phys.Lett. B759.159.


Selected research activities

Invited Plenary Talks at International Conferences/Workshops

  • Cosmological Implications of Higgs Near-Criticality “. Dec. 2016. “Helsinki Higgs Forum”, Helsinki (Finland).
  • Higgs Inflation as a Mirage, Dec. 2016,  Bethe Forum “Beyond the standard Higgs-system”, BCTP Bonn (Germany).
  • Cosmological relaxation of the electroweak scale, March 2016, 51st Rencontres de Moriond (EW), La Thuile (Italy).

Invited Seminars

  • LPTHE, Paris, France
  • Utrecht (Theoretical Cosmology Meetings), The Netherlands
  • IPPP Durham, UK
  • Technical Univ. Munich, Germany.

Stays of Research

  • CERN, Geneva (Switzerland).

Reviewer for

  • Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), U.K.
  • European Research Council ERC-Starting Grants.
  • National Science Center, Poland.