IIHE invited seminar: But is it the Standard Model scalar? Searches for BEH boson to fermions at ATLAS

by Dr Victoria Martin (University of Edinburgh)

Friday 29 May 2015, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Brussels

1G003 (VUB)

abstract: In 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN announced the discovery of a BEH boson, 48 years after it was first predicted by Robert Brout, François Englert, Peter Higgs and others. Subsequently further data from the first run of the LHC has confirmed many characteristics of the Standard Model scalar, including its decays to the photon and W- and Z-bosons, and its spin-less nature. However there is less strong evidence for couplings between the Higgs boson and fermions. ATLAS has evidence for BEH boson decay into tau-leptons, but no conclusive evidence for BEH boson decay into quarks. I will review the ATLAS measurements of the 125 GeV BEH boson, and the prospects for ATLAS to fully characterise the BEH boson during the second run of the LHC, including by measuring its decay into b-quarks. I will also share some of the excitement of the Edinburgh group from the award of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 to François Englert and Peter Higgs.