Theoretical studies of scalar particles in the standard model: Scalar mesons and Higgs Bosons

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The physics of elementary particles gives insight into the most fundamental constituents of matter and their behaviour. Many of the frontiers of elementary particle physics involve scalar particles. Scalars have no intrinsic spin, which means that there is no preferred direction for these particles when they are at rest. The most prominent example of a scalar particle is the Higgs boson, a particle which is essential to our understanding of the origin of mass for all elementary particles via the Higgs mechanism associated with symmetry breaking in the electroweak interaction. Surprisingly, there is still no direct experimental evidence of the Higgs particle that is so central to our theoretical understanding of the fundamental interactions of nature. The experimental program of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN should be able to confirm or refute the existence of the Higgs. In addition to the fundamental challenges of scalar particles in the electroweak sector, scalar particles composed of quarks also provide scientific challenges in the strong interaction sector. In particular, scalar mesons provide some of the most intriguing challenges in hadronic physics, with interpretations that include exotic states beyond the quark-antiquark states of the naive quark model. Some of these exotic interpretations of the scalar mesons include mesons containing no quarks (only gluons) or additional quark-antiquark pairs.