Description
The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 was a triumph for our understanding of how nature works at the smallest scales. In the past decade, many properties of this unique particle have been measured. But despite this remarkable progress, our global picture of the Higgs boson is still blurry. One of the most important properties has so far eluded precise experimental testing: the Higgs potential. Theory predicts that the Higgs boson’s underlying quantum field has a Mexican-hat shaped potential with a minimum at non-zero field values. The exact shape of this potential has far-reaching implications for our understanding of the electroweak vacuum and can be linked to baryogenesis in the early universe. But how can we test it?
In this seminar, I will show how searches for Higgs boson pair production with the ATLAS detector at the LHC enable us to directly probe the shape of the Higgs potential through the Higgs boson self-interaction. Starting with a snapshot of our current knowledge of the Higgs boson, I will discuss the experimental challenges that searches for Higgs boson pair production currently face, and how we are overcoming them. I will focus in particular on the recent ATLAS search in the final state with two b-quarks and two τ-leptons [1], and conclude with a roadmap towards observing this rare process at the High-Luminosity LHC.
Organised by
Diptaparna Biswas
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