Patricia Burchat
Canadian particle physicist
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Through Cosmology, Dark matter and Dark energy
Early life and education
Born in 1958, Burchat grew up in Barry's Bay, Ontario, Canada, and attended Madawaska Valley District High School. In 1981 she graduated with a B.S. in applied science and engineering from the University of Toronto, and earned a Ph.D. in physics at Stanford University in 1986.
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Career
Burchat held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 1986 to 1988, after which she joined the faculty until 1995. She has been a member of the Stanford Physics faculty since 1995, and served as the chair of the department from 2007 to 2010.
Research
Burchat has been a member of multiple particle physics experiments, including the Mark II experiment at the SLAC Linear Collider and the E791 experiment at Fermilab. She was a founding member of the BaBar experiment at SLAC which explored fundamental particle interactions, especially the weak interaction. In these experiments she researched Z bosons as the carriers of the weak interaction, heavy neutral leptons, semileptonic decay of charm mesons, charm mixing, CP violations in B meson decays, and differences in the way matter and antimatter evolved in time.
Burchat has also been interested in investigating the cosmological evolution of the Universe. She joined the international community developing the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, aiming to study gravitational bending of light by dark matter and the evolution of dark energy. Her 2008 TED talk, "Shedding light on dark matter", explores these two components making up about 96 percent of the universe.