Physics Colloquium

Lessons from the Large Hadron Collider: The Higgs Boson and Beyond

Matthew Strassler

Harvard University

Thursday, April 24th 2014

4:00 pm

DA 114

With two full years of data from the Large Hadron Collider, we are now in a position to begin evaluating the implications of its results.  The LHC's main discovery so far is of a new particle, a Higgs boson; meanwhile it has also demonstrated the success of the Standard Model of particle physics in many other measurements.  However, only a careful and thorough effort will allow us to draw correct conclusions about what these results imply about the new particle and about possible particle physics beyond the Standard Model, such as supersymmetry, additional Higgs particles, and new forces of nature.  This effort is painstaking and difficult; one must not underestimate the challenges of gathering data in the LHC environment and of properly interpreting the ``big data'' sets that it generates.  I will report on these efforts and where they stand, on the numerous measurements that remain to be done using the existing data set, and on how the current efforts may benefit the gathering of more data, in higher energy collisions, starting in 2015.