Nuclear Particle Astrophysics (NPA) Seminar, David Lopez Mateos, Harvard University, “Standard Model and New Physics in the Higgs Sector: The New Precision Era”

The discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC in 2012 culminated many decades of work and theoretical speculation. Its sheer discovery has not only ruled out many other theories of EW symmetry breaking, but also given it a mass and a set of properties. The measurement of these properties has wide-ranging implications across different fields in fundamental physics and provides a unique window into new physics. In this talk, I will discuss the state-of-the-art experimental results on the Higgs sector, coming from an extensive analysis of the LHC Run 1 data. These results include direct constraints on beyond the Standard Model (BSM) realizations of the Higgs sector, as well as indirect constraints on popular BSM theories. I will then focus on how ATLAS prepared for early searches and precision physics on the onset of Run 2, and how to make the most of the Run 2 data to map the Higgs sector. I will conclude discussing projections on the improvements in our understanding of this new sector that can be achieved at the HL-LHC and the hardware and event reconstruction challenges that need to be overcome for this purpose.