Special Seminar

Date and time: 26 November 2015 (Thursday), 4:00 pm
Venue: Seminar Hall

Title: Voyage of Discovery of the Higgs boson and Beyond

Speaker: Prof. Jim Virdee, Imperial College London.

Abstract: The talk will briefly describe the journey to the discovery of the Higgs boson, selected other physics highlights from the Run 1 of the LHC, and a look forward to the LHC programme over the next two decades. Undoubtedly the most important result emerging from the Run 1 of the LHC is the discovery, in July 2012, of the Higgs boson that appears to have properties consistent with those predicted for the SM Higgs boson. Brief details will be given of the design and construction of CMS experiment. The boson's discovery and recent results from the many CMS measurements of the properties of the boson using the full dataset from Run I of LHC will be presented. The LHC has started operations in spring 2015 with the energy of the beams almost doubled. By the end of this decade the LHC experiments will have examined ten times more proton-proton collisions than in Run 1. The European strategy for particle physics calls for the LHC and its experiments to be upgraded, and to start taking data from mid-2020's onwards, with the goal of examining an additional factor of ten times larger number of collisions, some 100 times the number so far examined. These data, at the higher LHC energy, will not only provide more definitive information about the nature of the found Higgs boson, but also whether it is alone or comes with an entourage of heavy fundamental particles. More generally, hints will be sought of physics beyond the standard model of particle physics (BSM). Several BSM hypotheses have been put forward. The widely anticipated new discoveries should open the road ahead to the cherished goal of a unified theory.