Jan Schütte-Engel works on theoretical high energy particle physics, astroparticle physics and cosmology. He is based at UC Berkeley. Jan is interested in probing high energy particle physics with gravitational waves (GWs) that were emitted in the early and late universe. Additionally he works on new ideas for earth based experiments to discover new physics.

Searching for new physics with GWs: GWs enable us to test existing physics laws and search for new particles under previously unprobed conditions. In his research Jan considers GWs from the early and late universe. In particular he works on GWs from the thermal plasma and GWs that were emitted during mergers of compact objects in our late universe. To compute the expected GW signals Jan uses techniques from high energy particle physics and cosmology.

Novel ideas for earth-based experiments to search for new physics: Jan investigates novel detection ideas for GWs in the high frequency regime because many signals which encode new physics are expected to peak in this regime. In addition Jan also develops novel ideas for axion dark matter (DM) direct detection. Proposing new ideas for GW and DM detection is very interdisciplinary since it often involves ideas from condensed matter physics and quantum sensing. Recently, Jan and his collaborators have shown that often times dark mater experiments can also be used to search for high frequency gravitational waves. Lastly, Jan is also interested in table-top experiments that can probe the quantum nature of gravity.