[Seminars] Particle Physics Seminar Today!

[Holly Jaffey]

PARTICLE PHYSICS SEMINAR TODAY

Monday March 12, 2018
PRC 201
4:15pm

Speaker: Caterina Vernieri (Fermilab)

Title:  The Beauty of the Higgs boson

Abstract: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s most energetic particle accelerator. During its first run (2009-2012), the ATLAS and CMS experiments discovered the Higgs boson. This discovery marked a historical milestone in the study of fundamental particles and their interactions. Physicists are nowadays measuring the Higgs boson’s properties to build deep understanding of the Higgs sector of the Standard Model and potentially to unveil Beyond the Standard Model phenomena. The Higgs boson can also be used as a discovery tool in direct searches for new particles coupling to the Higgs. Both in the precision and the direct search programs a special role is played by the Higgs decay into b quarks since it occurs with the largest probability of all its decay channels. However, searches for these decays in the gluon fusion production mode have long been considered impossible due to the overwhelming background from QCD production of b quarks. In this talk I will show how we can access this process in the boosted topology, where the Higgs to bb system is reconstructed as a single, large-radius jet. The techniques developed to identify and reconstruct Higgs bosons with momentum considerably higher than their mass are crucial as they enable searches for previously inaccessible new physics scenarios.
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