Graduate Lunch Talk: Savannah Thais, Yale Physics, “The LHC: What can the worlds largest machine do after finding the Higgs?”

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is the largest physics experiment in history, and is home to four unique detectors (ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb) designed to measure fundamental particles. Using data collected by these experiments during Run 1, physicists were able to identify the Higgs boson in 2012, experimentally verifying the complete Standard Model. However, now the LHC is running at nearly twice the Run 1 energy, giving us unparalleled opportunities to make more precise measurements of Standard Model particle properties and search for new physics (Dark Matter, SUSY, extra dimensions, new particles, and more). I will give a description of the design and functionality of the LHC/ATLAS and describe the steps necessary to complete a search at the LHC, starting from data collection to final analysis. I will then discuss my current work using machine learning techniques to search for a dark sector vector boson through a Higgs decay process.