About

LianTao Wang is a professor in the Department of Physics, the Enrico Fermi Institute, and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on theoretical particle physics. Currently, he dedicates most of his time to studying the Higgs boson, dark matter, and the early universe.

Research topics

• Physics
• Particle physics
• Nuclear physics
• Quantum mechanics
• Political Science
• Atomic physics

Selected publications

• A new probe of <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" altimg="si4.svg" display="inline" id="d1e322"><mml:mrow><mml:mi>μ</mml:mi><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">Hz</mml:mi></mml:mrow></mml:math> gravitational waves with FRB timing

  Physics of the Dark Universe · 2025-06-16 · 4 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Probing Primordial Power Spectrum and Non-Gaussianities With Fast Radio Bursts

  ArXiv.org · 2025-04-14

  articleOpen access

  We use the precision measurements of the arrival time differences of the same fast radio burst (FRB) source along multiple sightlines to measure the primordial power spectrum and Non-Gaussianities. The anticipated experiment requires a sightline separation of 100 AU, achieved by sending three or more radio telescopes to the outer solar system. The Shapiro time delays, measured relatively between different telescopes, are sensitive to the gradient field of the gravitational potential between different sightlines. Since the arrival time difference is independent of when the transient signal is emitted from the source, every measurement of the detected FRB source can be correlated. With enough FRB sources discovered, we can map the gravitational potential across the sky. We further calculate the two-point and three-point correlation function of the arrival time difference between telescopes for different FRB sources in the sky. If $10^4$ FRBs were to be detected, our results suggest that this technique can test the inflationary scale-invariant power spectrum down to $\sim 10^3\,\rm Mpc^{-1}$ and primordial Non-Gaussianities at a level of $f_{\rm NL}\sim 1$.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Anatomy of Parity-violating Trispectra in Galaxy Surveys

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2025-04-03

  preprintOpen access

  Parity-violating interactions are ubiquitous phenomena in particle physics. If they are significant during cosmic inflation, they can leave imprints on primordial perturbations and be observed in correlation functions of galaxy surveys. Importantly, parity-violating signals in the four-point correlation functions (4PCFs) cannot be generated by Einstein gravity in the late universe on large scales, making them unique and powerful probes of high-energy physics during inflation. However, the complex structure of the 4PCF poses challenges in diagnosing the underlying properties of parity-violating interactions from observational data. In this work, we introduce a general framework that provides a streamlined pipeline directly from a particle model in inflation to galaxy 4PCFs in position space. We demonstrate this framework with a series of toy models, effective-field-theory-like models, and full models featuring tree-level exchange-type processes with chemical-potential-induced parity violation. We further showed the detection sensitivity of these models from BOSS data and highlighted potential challenges in data interpretation and model prediction.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Searching Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background Landscape Across Frequency Bands

  ArXiv.org · 2025-11-24

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Gravitational wave (GW) astrophysics is entering a multi-band era with upcoming GW detectors, enabling detailed mapping of the stochastic GW background across vast frequencies. We highlight this potential via a new physics scenario: hybrid topological defects from a two-step phase transition separated by inflation. We develop a general pipeline to analyze experimental exclusions and apply it to this model. The model offers a possible explanation of the pulsar timing array signal at low frequencies, and future experiments (LISA/Cosmic Explorer/Einstein Telescope) will confirm or rule it out via the higher-frequency probes, showcasing the power of multi-band constraints.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Improving change detection using conditional discriminative adversarial regularization

  Machine Vision and Applications · 2025-11-23

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• HF-D-FINE: High-resolution features enhanced D-FINE for tiny object detection in UAV image

  Image and Vision Computing · 2025-11-20 · 2 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Composite resonances at a 10 TeV muon collider

  Journal of High Energy Physics · 2024-04-17 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  A bstract We investigate the reach for resonances of the composite Higgs models at a 10 TeV μ + μ − collider with up to 10 ab − 1 luminosity. The strong dynamics sector is modeled by the minimal coset SO(5)/SO(4), where vector resonances are in ( 3 , 1 ) of SO(4) and fermions are in ( 2 , 2 ). Various production and decay channels are studied. For the spin-1 resonances, the projections are made based on the radiative return and vector boson fusion production channels. The muon collider can cover most of the kinematically allowed mass range and can measure the coupling g ρ to percent level. For the fermionic resonances (i.e. the top partners), pair production easily covers the resonance mass below 5 TeV, while single production extends the reach to 6 TeV for a small ξ = 0 . 015.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Topportunities at the LHC: rare top decays with light singlets

  The European Physical Journal C · 2024-10-23 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract The discovery of the top quark, the most massive elementary particle yet known, has given us a distinct window into investigating the physics of the Standard Model and beyond. With a plethora of top quarks to be produced in the high luminosity era of the LHC, the exploration of its rare decays holds great promise in revealing potential new physics phenomena. We consider higher-dimensional operators contributing to flavour-changing-neutral-current top decays in the SMEFT and its extension by a light singlet species of spin 0, 1/2, or 1, and exhibit that the HL-LHC (and other future colliders) may observe many exotic top decays in a variety of channels. Light singlets which primarily talk to the SM through such a top interaction may also lead to distinctive long-lived particle signals. Searching for such long-lived particles in top-quark decays has the additional advantage that the SM decay of the other top quark in the same event provides a natural trigger.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Top Yukawa coupling determination at high energy muon collider

  Physical review. D/Physical review. D. · 2024-02-27 · 14 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The Top Yukawa coupling profoundly influences several core mysteries linked to the electroweak scale and the Higgs boson. We study the feasibility of measuring the Top Yukawa coupling at high energy muon colliders by examining the high energy dynamics of the weak boson fusion to top quark pair processes. A deviation of the Top Yukawa coupling from the Standard Model would lead to a modified <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><a:mrow><a:mi>V</a:mi><a:mi>V</a:mi><a:mo stretchy="false">→</a:mo><a:mi>t</a:mi><a:mover accent="true"><a:mrow><a:mi>t</a:mi></a:mrow><a:mrow><a:mo stretchy="false">¯</a:mo></a:mrow></a:mover></a:mrow></a:math> process, violating unitarity at high energy. Our analysis reveals that utilizing a muon collider with a center-of-mass energy of 10 TeV and an integrated luminosity of <f:math xmlns:f="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><f:mrow><f:mn>10</f:mn><f:mtext> </f:mtext><f:mtext> </f:mtext><f:msup><f:mrow><f:mi>ab</f:mi></f:mrow><f:mrow><f:mo>−</f:mo><f:mn>1</f:mn></f:mrow></f:msup></f:mrow></f:math> allows us to investigate the Top Yukawa coupling with a precision surpassing 1.5%, more than one order of magnitude better than the precision from <h:math xmlns:h="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><h:mi>t</h:mi><h:mover accent="true"><h:mi>t</h:mi><h:mo stretchy="false">¯</h:mo></h:mover><h:mi>h</h:mi></h:math> channel at muon colliders. This precision represents a notable enhancement compared to the anticipated sensitivities of the High-Luminosity LHC (3.4%) and those at muon colliders derived from the <l:math xmlns:l="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><l:mi>t</l:mi><l:mover accent="true"><l:mi>t</l:mi><l:mo stretchy="false">¯</l:mo></l:mover><l:mi>H</l:mi></l:math> process. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• GAN-Based Unsupervised Day to Night Image Translation for Nighttime Vehicle Detection

  2024-09-20

  articleSenior author

  A reliable large amount of data is the foundation of deep learning-based target detection tasks. However, the current lack of road datasets in nighttime environments has been a significant hindrance to the development of nighttime vehicle detection. The emergence of adversarial generative networks has made it a promising research direction to translate the existing large amount of daytime images into nighttime images. However, the current translation models are either demanding of the existing data, requiring instance segmentation-level labels; or focused on the general domain. As a result, applying them directly to the day-to-night translation task will produce many unreasonable light spots in the generated images due to nighttime lights. In light of these considerations, this paper proposes a GAN-based unsupervised day-to-night image conversion model, UD2NGAN, which can translate daytime road images to nighttime images without needing segmentation labels. Furthermore, this approach mitigates the occurrence of anomalous light spots in the generated images. The contributions of this paper are threefold. First, we propose a highlight suppression module, which is used to preprocess nighttime images and reduce the number of unreasonable light spots in the generated images. Second, we employ an edge detection module to extract edge features from both the original and the generated images. This results in the retention of more information about the road targets in the generated images. Third, we demonstrate the superiority of our approach by applying the same detectors to multiple datasets.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Zhen Liu

  Nanjing University

  36 shared

• Jia Liu

  35 shared

• Tao Han

  Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

  33 shared

• Kun-Feng Lyu

  University of Minnesota

  25 shared

• Stefania Gori

  23 shared

• Xiao-Ping Wang

  22 shared

• Matthew Reece

  Harvard University

  22 shared

• J. Fan

  Institute of High Energy Physics

  22 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Nanjing University of Science and Technology

  2016

• Visiting Student

  Carnegie Mellon University

  2014

• B.S.

  Nanjing University of Science and Technology

  2004