Today at Brown

Ulrich Heintz’s arrival is more than just a new posting. You could argue he was meant to be at Brown all along.

The incoming professor in physics is married to Meenakshi Narain, associate professor of physics at Brown. The two, and their sons, 13-year-old Aneesh and 4-year-old Anand, are moving to Providence from the Boston area.

Heintz, a particle physicist, has worked for years alongside Narain and other Brown physicists, including David Cutts and Greg Landsberg, on high-energy particle collisions at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

“It’s a combination of bringing the family together and working with a group that I love” to collaborate with, said Heintz.

The 48-year-old native of Stuttgart, Germany, has been associate professor of physics at Boston University since 2003. He earned his master’s and Ph.D. in physics at the State University of New York–Stony Brook, meeting Narain during his studies. (She was also a graduate student.) They have been married 21 years.

At Brown, Heintz will concentrate on high-energy physics experiments taking place at Fermilab and at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle collider, that may offer scientists a peek into the conditions that occurred less than a millionth of a second after the universe’s creation 13.7 billion years ago. The collision of proton beams at the underground complex in Switzerland could reveal a host of particles that physicists have theorized exist but have yet to see in nature.

One of those “missing” particles is the Higgs boson, an object of great interest to Heintz. The Higgs particle is important because it could help explain how matter has mass.

“The two possibilities are that the (Higgs) particle doesn’t exist … or there is some other physical principle that we don’t know that causes this cancellation,” explained Heintz, who will travel regularly this fall to the collider. “And if there is this phenomenon, we should be able to see it in the LHC.”

Heintz has been working with other subatomic particles — the W Boson and the top quark — at Fermilab since the early 1990s. He was deeply involved in the teams that found evidence of single production of top quarks.

“I find it fascinating that you can measure these things and find their properties,” he said.