DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY

Robert Oakes is interested in several areas of particle theory. He has done calculations of the decay constants of beauty and charmed mesons that show that certain ratios of the constants are required to be unity within a percent as a direct consequence of only the general structure of the standard theory of quarks and leptons. He has studied heavy-quark systems (including rare decay modes) looking for possible mechanisms that might enhance their branching fractions over the Standard Model values. Oakes and his collaborators have also calculated the QCD supersymmetric and electroweak corrections to heavy-quark (beauty or top), Higgs meson, and sparticle (of supersymmetry) production in electron-positron annihilation and at hadron colliders. The corrections can be appreciable in certain interesting cases. Oakes has calculated the radiative decay rates of several heavy-quark states, specifically the charmed D mesons. The key to doing this is the heavy-quark effective theory that describes the nonradiative decays. Electromagnetic interactions are then introduced by gauging the effective heavy-quark interaction. Oakes has also developed an effective model for charmed-meson semileptonic decays and has predicted the branching ratios and polarization parameters for a number of yet-unmeasured processes. Most recently Oakes has focused on investigating processes relevant to the Large Hadron Collider and the International Linear Collider.

Awards and Honors

• Alfred P. Sloan Fellow
• Fulbright-Hays Distinguished Professor
• Fellow, American Physical Society
• Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Recipient, Science Prize of China

Selected Publications

• Q. Li, C. S. Li, R. J. Oakes, and L. Yang
  Charged Higgs Production at Linear Colliders in Large Extra Dimensions
  Phys. Rev. D72, 076007 (2005)
• G. Gao, R. J. Oakes, and J. M. Yang
  Heavy Supersymmetric Particle Effects in Higgs Boson Production Associated with a Bottom Quark Pair at LHC and Tevatron
  Phys. Rev. D71, 095005 (2005)
• L. G. Jin, C. S. Li, Q. Li, J. J. Liu, and R. J. Oakes
  Next-to-Leading Order QCD Predictions for Pair Production of Neutral Higgs Bosons at the CERN Large Hadron Collider
  Phys. Rev. D71, 095004 (2005)
• J. Cao, G. Gao, R. J. Oakes, and J. M. Yang
  Higgs Boson Production Associated with a Bottom Quark at Hadron Colliders with Supersymmetric QCD Corrections
  Phys. Rev. D68, 075012 (2003)
• J. Cao, R. J. Oakes, F. Wang, and J. M. Yang
  Supersymmetric Effects in Top Quark Decay into Polarized W Bosons
  Phys. Rev. D68, 054019 (2003)