Past Events

Abstract

The Higgs boson figures prominently in the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking that gives mass to elementary particles and was the last piece of the Standard Model to be discovered. Having observed Higgs decays to photons and to weak vector bosons, the focus of the ATLAS and CMS experiments on the Large Hadron Collider has moved to detailed measurements of its properties to either confirm the Standard Model nature of this new particle or find deviations that could indicate the presence of new physical particles or symmetries. Although most results so far point to agreement with Standard Model predictions, a still outstanding question is whether this particle couples to leptons and thus how the mass of fundamental fermions is related to the Higgs mechanism. I will review the current status of the Higgs measurements and then focus on the search for the Higgs decay to two tau leptons by the ATLAS experiment. Given that the Higgs mass is light at about 125 GeV/c2, this channel will play an important role in studying its decay branching fractions and uncovering possible relationships to physics beyond the Standard Model, with promising sensitivity to spin and charge-parity properties. I will also discuss some previous tracking-based results from ATLAS that show the performance of the detector and the Monte Carlo simulation.

Coffee and tea will be served 20 minutes prior to the seminar.