Center for Particles and Fields Seminar

Dr. Joao Guimaraes da Costa, Harvard University

"Discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider: The Standard Model and Beyond"

2:00pm, RLM 9.222

Abstract: Scientists have been exploring the high energy frontier with the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for the last four years. The substantial dataset accumulated thus far, albeit at lower energy than initially foreseen, already yielded a Nobel prize award. A newly discovered particle has been shown to behave very much like the long-sought-after Higgs Boson, and hence it completes the discovery of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Remarkably, no other deviations from the Standard Model have been found, neither in precision measurements nor in direct searches for new particles.

The LHC will resume operations in 2015, after a 2-year shutdown, with increased center of mass energy, and thus, with increased potential for new discoveries. Precise measurements of the Standard Model phenomena at these unprecedented energies are a key element of any such discoveries, and allows us to constrain physics beyond the Standard Model. In this talk, I will review measurements from ATLAS, with a focus on the study of the newly discovered boson, and will briefly discuss what we expect to learn from the future LHC data.