José Ramón Espinosa

Institut de Física d'Altes Energies

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 other experiments will provide us in coming years with crucial data to guide research in this fundamental field.

Selected publications

- Espinosa JR, Racco D & Riotto A 2018, 'Cosmological Signature of the Standard Model Higgs Vacuum Instability: Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter', Physical Review Letters, 120, 12, 121301.

- Espinosa JR, Racco D & Riotto A 2018, 'Primordial black holes from Higgs vacuum instability: avoiding fine-tuning through an ultraviolet safe mechanism', European Physical Journal C, 78, 10, 806.

- Espinosa JR, Racco D & Riotto A 2018 'A Cosmological Signature of the Standard Model Higgs Vacuum Instability: Gravitational Waves', Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 1809, 012

- Espinosa JR 2018, 'A fresh look at the calculation of tunneling actions', Journal Of Cosmology And Astroparticle Physics, , 7, 036.

- Espinosa JR & Konstandin T 2018, 'Resummation of Goldstone infrared divergences: A proof to all orders', Physical Review D, 97, 5, 056020.

- Espinosa JR & Cline JM 2018, 'Axionic Landscape for Higgs Coupling Near-Criticalit', Physical Review  D97, 035025.

- Espinosa JR 2018, 'Cosmological implications of Higgs near-criticality', Philosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society A-mathematical Physical And Engineering Sciences, 376, 2114, 20170118.


Selected research activities

Invited Seminars:

SISSA, Trieste, Italy.
DESY, Hamburg, Germany.
Bonn Univ., Germany.
Heidelberg Univ., Germany.
CERN-TH, Geneva, Switzerland.

Invited Plenary Talks at International Conferences/Workshops::

KEK Theory Meeting on Particle Physics Phenomenology. KEK, Tsukuba (Japan).

Cosmological probes of BSM - from the Big Bang to the LHC. Benasque (Spain).

Conference Organizer:

Strong and Electroweak Matter, Barcelona

Pre-SUSY Summer School, Barcelona

The International Conference on Supersymmetry and Unification of Fundamental Interactions, SUSY18, Barcelona

Stays of Research:

IFT-UAM/CSIC, Madrid (Spain)

CERN, Geneva (Switzerland)

Reviewer:

Rapporteur for the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) programme.

Prizes and Awards:

First Prize of the 2018 edition of the Buchalter Cosmology Prize