Abstract: With the milestone discovery of the Higgs boson at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), high energy physics has entered a new era. The completion of the “Standard Model” (SM) implies, for the first time ever, that we have a relativistic, quantum-mechanical, self-consistent theoretical framework, conceivably valid up to exponentially high energies, even to the Planck scale. Yet, the SM leaves many unanswered questions both from the theoretical and observational perspectives, including the nature of the electroweak superconductivity and its phase transition, the hierarchy between the particle masses and between the observed physical scales, the nature of dark matter etc. There are thus compelling reasons to believe that new physics beyond the SM exists. We argue that the collective efforts of future high energy physics programs, in particular the future colliders such as a Higgs factory, a 100 TeV hadron collider and a multi-TeV muon collider, hold great promise to uncover the laws of nature to a deeper level.
Speaker: Tao Han, University of Pittsburgh
Host: Ian Low