Particle Physics Seminar: Dr. Andre Frankenthal, Princeton

The energy of particle accelerators has been on constant rise for about a century, with the LHC reaching a remarkable 13.6 TeV center-of-mass energy in 2022. Such high energies allow physicists to search for increasingly heavier states produced in particle collisions. However, plenty of new physics scenarios involve much lighter unknown particles, which could nevertheless be experimentally accessible by the beam-intense accelerators of today. In this talk, I will describe how the innovative “data scouting” and “data parking” techniques of the CMS experiment at CERN can be used to probe very rare phenomena, including a new search for few-GeV dark photons and the first observation of the rare muon double-Dalitz decay of the eta meson (a particle with a mass of only 548 MeV). I will then discuss how these rare meson decays themselves can be exploited to search for signs of new physics and potentially lower the CMS mass sensitivity to new vector bosons to only a few MeV.