Sokratis Trifinopoulos

Postdoctoral Researcher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

About

I am a theoretical physicist exploring the boundaries of the Standard Model of particle physics and the Lambda cold dark matter model of cosmology. My approach integrates a wide spectrum of methods, ranging from traditional model building in Quantum Field Theory to Quantum Information Theory and intepretable Artificial Intelligence.

Interests

Beyond the Standard Model: flavour, naturaleness, dark matter.
Beyond the ΛCDM: primordial black holes, modified galaxy formation.
Phenomenology at/with: future colliders (Electron-Ion Collider, Muon Colliders), nuclear facilities (ITER), cosmological probes (James-Webb Telescope, gravitational wave experiments).
Fusion of Quantum Information theoretic concepts with High-Energy Physics.
Interpretable Artificial Intelligence for (Nuclear) Physics applications.

Education

PhD in Theoretical Physics, 2020
University of Zürich
MSc in Physics, 2016
ETH Zürich
BSc in Physics, 2014
Technical University of Dortmund

Experience

PostDoc

MIT, IAIFI

June 2022 – Present Massachusetts, USA

PostDoc

SISSA

October 2020 – May 2022 Trieste, Italy

Recent Publications

For a complete list of publications see my Inspire page.

Searching for exotic scalars at fusion reactors

Part of the energy created in deuterium-tritium fusion reactors is carried away from plasma by a high-intensity neutron flux, which is then absorbed by the inner walls of the reactor. The interactions of neutrons with the materials within the walls can result in the production of dark sector particles, feebly interacting light scalars or pseudoscalars, via nuclear transitions. We estimate the potential size of such dark sector flux and consider possible detection methods at current and future thermonuclear fusion reactors.

Flavor Patterns of Fundamental Particles from Quantum Entanglement?

We speculate on the (unlikely but tantalizing) possibility that minimization of quantum entanglement might be a fundamental principle that determines particle physics input parameters.

Spontaneous symmetry breaking, gauge hierarchy and electroweak vacuum metastability

We derive a new metastability bound for the Higgs mass parameter. When the bound for the positive mass parameter is significantly more restrictive than or comparable to its counterpart for the negative, it may offer an explanation for the spontaneous symmetry breaking itself.

From Neurons to Neutrons: A Case Study in Interpretability

Mechanistic Interpretability promises a path toward fully understanding how neural networks make their predictions. We argue that neural networks can learn low-dimensional representations of their training data that are surprisingly faithful to human-derived domain knowledge. As a case study, we extract nuclear physics concepts by studying models trained to reproduce nuclear data.

NuCLR: Nuclear Co-Learned Representations

We introduce Nuclear Co-Learned Representations (NuCLR), a deep learning model that predicts various nuclear observables, including binding and decay energies, and nuclear charge radii. The model is trained using a multi-task approach with shared representations and obtains state-of-the-art performance, achieving levels of precision that are crucial for understanding fundamental phenomena in nuclear (astro)physics.

Scrutinizing the primordial black hole interpretation of PTA gravitational waves and JWST early galaxies

Recent observations have granted to us two unique insights into the early Universe: the presence of a low-frequency stochastic gravitational wave background detected by the NANOGrav and Pulsar Timing Array (PTA) experiments and the emergence of unusually massive galaxy candidates at high redshifts reported by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). We consider the possibility that both observations have a common origin, namely supermassive primordial black holes.

LePDF: Standard Model PDFs for high-energy lepton colliders

The emission of collinear radiation off an elementary lepton can be factorised from the hard scattering process by introducing Parton Distribution Functions of a Lepton (LePDF), which, contrary to protons, can be derived from first principles. In case of multi-TeV lepton colliders, such as the muon colliders currently being proposed, the complete structure of Standard Model interactions must be taken into account.