Navigating the LHC Era

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This award funds the research activities of Professor Adam Martin at the University of Notre Dame. The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in July 2012 has placed the high-energy physics community in a unique, exciting place -- having available a machine dedicated to pushing into unexplored territory and a new tool, the Higgs boson, to utilize. This project aims to capitalize on this situation by squeezing the most physics out of the existing LHC dataset, looking for hints of other particles and/or forces. The hints of new particles/forces arising as the result of this project can be searched for in detail once the second phase of the CERN LHC begins in mid-2015. This work has a broad impact in that it will guide future experimental searches and involves close collaboration with experimenters, both at Notre Dame and at CERN. Professor Martin's research project involves two complementary approaches. One approach is to make sure there are no `holes' in the data where new physics could hide. This requires improving existing searches, adapting searches to alternative scenarios, and even motivating new searches. Examples would include nearly degenerate supersymmetric particles, where one decays into the other with a macroscopic decay length. The second approach is to use the Higgs boson as an indirect probe of new physics, studying its properties in detail and looking for deviations. In particular, much needs to be done regarding the differential "moments" of Higgs production. Both approaches require a mixture of model building and collider physics. To further broaden the impact of this project, Professor Martin will collaborate with QuarkNet, an NSF-funded outreach program for high school teachers and students. He will act as an particle physics mentor, providing basic theory context for the hands-on QuarkNet activities.