Jay Wacker

I live in the Bay Area with my wife Mira and daughter Zoe. I've spent my career moving between deep technical problems and the real world. As a theoretical physicist at SLAC and Stanford, I proposed new paradigms for dark matter, helped redesign how the LHC searches for new particles, and published 64 papers with ~10,000 citations. At Quora, I built the systems that organized the world's knowledge on a top-30 website. At Apple, I lead the ML team behind Siri's natural language understanding, shipping across 6 operating systems to billions of users.

I write about things I'm curious about: wealth tax design from first principles, what Bronze Age DNA reveals about Greek mythology, and how to develop engineers who think for themselves. Outside of work, I cook, take photographs, travel actively (40+ countries and counting), and read too many books about ancient civilizations.

Latest writing

50 Ways the Constitution Is Under-Maintained — 4/13/2026
Why the Worst Drug Epidemic Didn't Produce a Musical Movement — 4/5/2026
Dialing the Quantum-Classical Border — 4/4/2026
Oedipus Before Homer — 3/25/2026

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Selected research

Structures of Medium-Sized Silicon Clusters — Nature 392 (1998) 582-585
Deconstructing Six-Dimensional Gauge Theories with Strongly Coupled Moose Meshes — unpublished
Phenomenology of Electroweak Symmetry Breaking from Theory Space — JHEP 0208:020 (2002)
Higher Dimensional Supersymmetry in 4D Superspace — JHEP 0203:055 (2002)
Mooses, Topology and Higgs — JHEP 0208:019 (2002)
The Minimal Moose for a Little Higgs — JHEP 0208:021 (2002)
Little Higgs and the Hierarchy Problem — unpublished
Little Higgs Models: New Approaches to the Hierarchy Problem — Nucl. Phys. B Proc. Suppl. 117 (2003) 728-730
Composite Vector Mesons from QCD to the Little Higgs — unpublished
CDF Central Outer Tracker — Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A 526 (2004) 249-299
One Loop Predictions of the Finely Tuned SSM — Phys. Rev. D 70:117703 (2004)
Little Higgs and Custodial SU(2) — Phys. Rev. D 69 (2004) 035002
Scalar Dark Matter from Theory Space — Phys. Rev. D 69:065022 (2004)
What Precision Electroweak Physics Says About the SU(6)/Sp(6) Little Higgs — Phys. Rev. D 69 (2004) 115008
e-e- Probes of the Littlest Higgs — Int. J. Mod. Phys. A 20 (2005) 7412-7422
Limits on Split Supersymmetry from Gluino Cosmology — Phys. Rev. D 72 (2005) 075011
Four Taus at the Tevatron
D-terms, Unification, and the Higgs Mass — JHEP 0606:034 (2006)
Reheating Metastable O'Raifeartaigh Models — Phys. Rev. D 75:085006 (2007)
Stopping Gluinos — Phys. Rev. D 76 (2007) 055007
Unification and Dark Matter in a Minimal Scalar Extension of the Standard Model — unpublished
Searching for Gluinos at the Tevatron and Beyond — Int. J. Mod. Phys. A 23 (2008) 4637-4646
N-flation — JCAP 0808:003 (2008)
Searching for Directly Decaying Gluinos at the Tevatron — Phys. Lett. B 666 (2008) 34-37
Model-Independent Jets plus Missing Energy Searches — Phys. Rev. D 79 (2009) 015005
Discovering the Higgs with Low Mass Muon Pairs — Phys. Rev. D 79 (2009) 115006
Bigger, Better, Faster, More at the LHC — JHEP 12 (2010) 030
Collective Quartics from Simple Groups — JHEP 06 (2010) 041
The Cosmology of Composite Inelastic Dark Matter — JHEP 1006:113 (2010)
The Hunt for New Physics at the Large Hadron Collider — Nucl. Phys. Proc. Suppl. 200-202 (2010) 185-417
Using Atom Interferometry to Search for New Forces — Phys. Lett. B 690 (2010) 38-41
Composite Inelastic Dark Matter — Phys. Lett. B 692 (2010) 323-326
Parity Violation in Composite Inelastic Dark Matter Models — Phys. Rev. D 82 (2010) 055023
Disentangling Dark Matter Dynamics with Directional Detection — Phys. Rev. D 81 (2010) 096005
Poker Face of Inelastic Dark Matter: Prospects at Upcoming Direct Detection Experiments — Phys. Rev. D 82 (2010) 031901
Model Independent Bounds on Kinetic Mixing — Adv. High Energy Phys. 2011, 859762
Nearly Supersymmetric Dark Atoms — Adv. High Energy Phys. 2011 (2011) 709492
Boosted Objects: A Probe of Beyond the Standard Model Physics — Eur. Phys. J. C 71 (2011) 1661
Where the Sidewalk Ends: Jets and Missing Energy Search Strategies for the 7 TeV LHC — JHEP 10 (2011) 012
The Simplicity of Perfect Atoms: Degeneracies in Supersymmetric Hydrogen — J. Math. Phys. 52 (2011) 062102
It's On: Early Interpretations of ATLAS Results in Jets and Missing Energy Searches — Phys. Lett. B 702 (2011) 64-68
Higgs, Binos and Gluinos: Split Susy Within Reach — unpublished
Illuminating the 130 GeV Gamma Line with Continuum Photons — JHEP 10 (2012) 134
Heavy Flavor Simplified Models at the LHC — JHEP 01 (2012) 074
Jet Dipolarity: Top Tagging with Color Flow — JHEP 04 (2012) 007
Jet Substructure at the Tevatron and LHC: New Results, New Tools, New Benchmarks — J. Phys. G 39 (2012) 063001
Simplified Models for LHC New Physics Searches — J. Phys. G 39 (2012) 105005
A New Theory of Anyons — unpublished
High Multiplicity Searches at the LHC Using Jet Masses — Phys. Rev. D 85 (2012) 055029
Light Gluinos in Hiding: Reconstructing R-parity Violating Decays at the Tevatron — unpublished
Exploring the Dark Side of the Top Yukawa — unpublished
Here be Dragons: The Unexplored Continents of the CMSSM — JHEP 09 (2013) 061
Learning How to Count: A High Multiplicity Search for the LHC — JHEP 08 (2013) 136
Measuring the tth coupling from SSDL+2b measurements — Phys. Rev. D 88 (2013) 093006
A Comparison of Future Proton Colliders Using SUSY Simplified Models — Snowmass 2013 whitepaper
Boosted Objects and Jet Substructure at the LHC (BOOST 2012 Report) — Eur. Phys. J. C 74 (2014) 2792
Boosting Stop Searches with a 100 TeV Proton Collider — JHEP 11 (2014) 021
Jet Substructure Templates: Data-driven QCD Backgrounds for Fat Jet Searches — JHEP 05 (2014) 005
SUSY Simplified Models at 14, 33, and 100 TeV Proton Colliders — JHEP 04 (2014) 117
The SIMP Miracle — Phys. Rev. Lett. 113 (2014) 171301
Towards an Understanding of the Correlations in Jet Substructure — Eur. Phys. J. C 75 (2015) 409
Model for Thermal Relic Dark Matter of Strongly Interacting Massive Particles — Phys. Rev. Lett. 115 (2015) 021301
Dark Matter in 3D — JHEP 03 (2016) 149
Intelligent Assistant Language Understanding On Device — Apple Machine Learning Research (2023)

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