How Pairs of Higgs Bosons Help Us Understand the Standard Model and Beyond

Maximilian Swiatlowski,
TRIUMF

Abstract

The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider completed the Standard Model, but many fundamental open questions in particle physics remain. One question is particularly simple: how could the Big Bang produce the matter-dominated universe we observe without anti-matter, which should have been produced in equal parts? As the LHC produces collisions faster than ever before, the huge datasets the ATLAS experiment is collecting can provide answers to this question, and others, by enabling the measurement of the extremely rare production of pairs of Higgs bosons. Though difficult to observe, these signatures can directly measure the shape of the Higgs potential: deviations from the Standard Model's expectations could allow us to understand not just the history of the early universe that created the matter/anti-matter asymmetry, but questions like the future stability of the universe. This talk will focus on the challenges to detecting Higgs boson pairs, and how to interpret them to understand the true shape of the Higgs potential and consequences for physics beyond the Standard Model. The latest results from the ATLAS experiment will be presented, and prospects for future measurements at the High-Luminosity LHC and next-generation colliders will be discussed.TBA

Timbits, coffee, tea will be served in STI A before the colloquium.