CAREER: Higgs and Dark Sectors

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This CAREER award funds the research and outreach activities of Professor Stefania Gori at the University of Cincinnati. Particle physics faces two fundamental problems that point to "new physics" lying beyond our current understanding. The first of these is the existence of a relatively light so-called Higgs boson, as discovered by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012. The biggest mystery here is to explain the origin of the mass of this new particle. The second fundamental problem is to understand the nature and origin of the so-called "dark matter" that is five times more prevalent throughout the universe than ordinary matter. One possibility is that dark matter can arise together with a completely new sector of dark particles which have not been discovered by experiments conducted thus far because such particles are presumed to interact only very weakly with the known particles. As part of her proposed research, Professor Gori will pursue an ambitious research program focused on studying these two fundamental problems at the interface between high-energy and high-intensity experiments. She will explore new models with more than one Higgs boson and investigate extended dark-sector theories. As part of her work, she will also develop new search strategies for existing and planned experiments at Fermilab and extend its science mission with searches for dark particles. As such, Professor Gori's research furthers the national interest by advancing our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature and potentially enhancing the research done at one of the premier US national laboratories. Professor Gori will also initiate an outreach program aimed at underrepresented minorities (URMs), connecting the University of Cincinnati Physics Department with local high schools and elementary schools whose student populations are majority female or African-American. In particular, she will start a "Women in STEM: From High School to Academia" program, and she will broaden the after-school programs of local schools with predominantly URM student bodies. More technically, Professor Gori will build new models of extended sectors responsible for quark and lepton masses, and explore the signatures of such models at both low- and high-energy experiments, focusing on the connection between Higgs and flavor physics. Professor Gori will develop new search strategies for light dark sectors at existing and planned experiments at Fermilab: MINOS+, NOvA and the DUNE near detectors, and the SeaQuest nuclear physics experiment. This will allow searches for a vast set of dark-sector theories. Professor Gori will also work closely with the experimental collaborations to explore optimized setups for DUNE and SeaQuest to maximize their physics reach. Professor Gori will also exploit the connection between the Higgs and dark sectors in order to develop scenarios in which dark-sector particles are produced from Higgs decays, leading to novel signatures that can investigated over the coming years at the LHC.