FEATURED AUTHOR
Mattias Blennow
I obtained a MSc in Engineering physics from KTH in 2004 and continued with doctoral studies, which I completed in 2007. After postdocs at the Max-Planck Institutes for Physics (Munich) and Nuclear Physics (Heidelberg), I returned to KTH with a tenure track position in 2012 and got tenured as an associate professor in 2016. I am currently a Ramon y Cajal fellow at Instituto de Física Teórica (CSIC) in Madrid. Apart from my teaching, my research concerns neutrinos and dark matter physics.
Subjects: Physics
Biography
I was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in February 1980 and lived there until completing my PhD in theoretical particle physics in 2007. After obtaining my doctorate, I moved to Munich, Germany, for a 3.5 year postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for physics and later to Heidelberg, Germany, and the Max Planck Institute for nuclear physics for another one year postdoc before returning to Stockholm with a tenure track position as assistant professor in 2012 and later tenured as associate professor in 2016. In my capacity as a faculty member at KTH Royal Institute of Technology I have been teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in theoretical physics, including mathematical methods in physics, analytical mechanics, special relativity, and quantum field theory. I am currently also holding a Ramon y Cajal fellowship at Instituto de Física Teórica in Madrid, Spain.Education
-
MSc Engineering Physics, KTH, Stockholm, 2004
PhD Theoretical Physics, KTH, Stockholm, 2007
Areas of Research / Professional Expertise
-
My research is focused on phenomenological studies in particle physics, mainly directed towards the lepton and dark matter sectors and physics beyond the Standard Model.
Neutrinos are neutral particles in the Standard Model that interact only via the weak interactions. They are closely related to the charged leptons (electrons, muons, taus) and the observation that they undergo flavour transitions won the Nobel prize in 2016. These flavour transitions also imply that neutrinos have mass, which is not the case in the Standard Model. Together with my collaborators, I study how future neutrino experiments can probe the model parameters as well as the physics that give rise to neutrino masses.
About a quarter of the energy density in the Universe is composed of a yet unknown type of matter, called dark matter, whose effects we have so far only observed through its gravitational effects. This abundance of dark matter corresponds to about five times the amount of ordinary matter (the rest of the energy density seemingly being in the form of dark energy). My research in this field is focused on the astrophysical effects and distribution of dark matter, its creation in the early Universe, and the possible observable effects of different dark matter models.