the Mysterious Mass of the Higgs Boson

Christopher Verhaaren

Darwin 103
4:00 PM

The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012 triumphantly completed the Standard Model of particle physics and opened the experimental program studying this new particle. At the same time, particle experiments are searching for physics beyond the Standard Model, including an those that explain the hierarchy between the measured Higgs mass, and the Planck scale. Nearly all of the proposed resolutions to this "Hierarchy Problem" predict new particles which are light enough to be discovered at the LHC, but to date no new particles have appeared. However, the most powerful experimental probes assume the new particles carry the same "color" charge as the quarks within the proton. If the particles which keep the Higgs light do not carry this color, new search strategies need to be employed. In this talk Christopher Verhaaren introduces how color neutral particles can solve the Hierarchy Problem, and also some of the ways these new particles can be discovered at the LHC.