The Higgs Boson Talks to Itself - How and Why Physicists Study Higgs Boson Self-Interactions with the ATLAS Experiment

Rachel Hyneman

Darwin 103
3:00 PM

As the most recently discovered fundamental particle, the Higgs Boson offers a promising window into the nature of our universe. One special avenue of study is in measuring how the Higgs Boson interacts with itself. The Higgs bosons’ self-interactions carry important implications about both the microscopic and macroscopic behavior of our universe, from how this tiny fundamental particle comes into existence to whether our entire universe is “stable.” In this talk, I will discuss how we study the Higgs self-interaction through measurements of the production of pairs of Higgs Bosons at the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Producing a pair of Higgs bosons is substantially rarer than producing a single Higgs boson, which presents significant challenges for particle physicists to overcome.