Baryogenesis, Higgs bosons, and what's next
Prof. Corrinne Mills
UIC
Ten years after its discovery, the Higgs boson remains the subject of intense study at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) because of its unique properties and potential connection to physics beyond the Standard Model. As our measurements become more precise and more comprehensive measurements, the observed Higgs boson looks ever more like the one predicted by the Standard Model. This is both an experimental triumph and a conundrum. With all of the particles predicted by the SM discovered, there is no single, obvious next target for searches, but most of the questions that motivated the construction of the LHC remain. I will talk about how my research addresses one of the outstanding questions, baryogenesis, through searches for additional Higgs bosons. Looking to the future, I argue that we are entering an experiment-driven era, and will need the best possible multipurpose detectors for the high-luminosity LHC and future colliders. I will talk about one of the tools that will take us there, a silicon semiconductor particle tracker of unprecedented precision and resilience.