Electroweak and Flavor Physics at Run-II of the LHC

University Of Notre Dame, Notre Dame IN

Investigators

Abstract

This award funds the research activities of Professors Ikaros Bigi, Antonio Delgado, and Adam Martin at the University of Notre Dame. After the successful discovery of the Higgs particle, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has just resumed taking data. This new data is likely to show the need to modify our current Standard Model of particle physics in order to accommodate new particles and perhaps even new interactions. Professors Bigi, Delgado, and Martin propose to analyze this possibility within the framework of exotic models such as supersymmetry, strongly coupled Higgs sectors, and extra spacetime dimensions. As a result, research in this area advances the national interest by promoting the progress of science in one of its most fundamental directions: the discovery and understanding of new physical law. This project is also envisioned to have significant broader impacts, as the PI's will engage in the teaching of physics at the undergraduate and graduate level, lecturing at graduate physics summer schools and organizing workshops and conferences around the world, and teaching particle physics to high-school teachers and students through QuarkNet, both nationally and internationally. More technically, a careful study of how the new data can be accommodated into models of new physics will be performed. Simulations of collider data will be run to see if any excesses reported by the LHC can be explained in one particular model. Professors Delgado and Martin will try to implement new search strategies for situations where standard techniques fail to discover new physics. Professor Bigi will pay special attention into the implications of new physics on processes that lead to violations of flavor. Such situations are very rare in the Standard Model but nonetheless can provide a smoking gun for new models of particle physics.