Probing the Higgs self-coupling with the ATLAS detector

by Xiaohu Sun (University of Alberta)

Thursday 26 Dec 2019, 09:30 → 10:30 Asia/Shanghai

B105 (CHEP)

The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the summer of 2012 has experimentally confirmed the Brout–Englert–Higgs (BEH) mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking and mass generation. The BEH mechanism not only predicts the existence of a massive scalar particle, the Higgs boson, but also requires this scalar particle to couple to itself, which is not observed yet. Therefore, searching for the production of double Higgs bosons and measuring the Higgs boson self-coupling is a crucial examination of the BEH mechanism. Any deviation from the Standard Model predictions opens a window to new physics. Moreover, the form of the Higgs field potential, which generates the Higgs boson self-coupling after electroweak symmetry breaking, can have important cosmological implications for the early evolution of the Universe, involving, such as the predictions for vacuum stability and the models in which the Higgs boson acts as the inflation field. This talk will discuss the current status of probing the Higgs self-coupling with double Higgs boson searches and single Higgs boson differential cross section measurements using the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Dr. Xiaohu SUN got his PhD from the University of Grenoble. He started his postdoctoral research at CAS/IHEP and continued at the University of Alberta. Now he is working as a research associate at the University of Manchester. He has been working in collider physics with the ATLAS detector for almost 10 years. He performed single top-quark measurements, Beyond-the-Standard-Model Higgs searches, electroweak new physics studies, and more recently the searches of double Higgs bosons, as well as detector developments for the luminosity measurement and jet calibration software.