Description:

Title: Tools for finding life in the desert: high-energy physics meets the precision frontier

Speaker: Frank Petriello, Northwestern University

Abstract:

The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 ushered in a new era in

particle physics, culminating in the 2013 Nobel Prize for its theoretical

prediction.  The community has devoted the past two years

since this discovery to determining the underlying identity of this

state.  It so far matches the predictions of the Standard Model, and

is consistent with a 'desert' between the Higgs boson mass and the

Planck energy at which quantum gravity becomes strong.  The upcoming

Run II of the LHC will focus on measuring Higgs properties ever-more

precisely, and searching for extremely rare Higgs processes, 

to find an oasis of new phenomena in this desert.  The

success of this program depends crucially on the power and

sophistication of the tools used to determine

the Standard Model expectations extremely precisely.  Without reliable

predictions, we cannot distinguish

signatures of a theory beyond the Standard Model from the background

mirage.  We discuss recent theoretical progress that will enable the precision Higgs

program and the search for a new Standard Model at the LHC Run II.

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, colloquium