Colloquium/Symposium

ONLINE COLLOQUIUM: "A tale of a new generation: looking at the interaction of muons and Higgs bosons" by Alice Alfonsi (Nikhef)

Europe/Amsterdam
Nikhef

Nikhef

Description
The discovery of the Higgs boson marked a historic milestone in particle physics, filling in the last missing piece of our current most successful model of elementary particles and their interactions. Yet many fundamental scientific questions, such as the origin of fermion masses, remain open. Measuring the properties of the Higgs boson, now accessible at the Large Hadron Collider, may play a pivotal role in finding answers. This summer, the ATLAS and CMS experiments published their analyses of the full 13 TeV dataset in the search for Higgs boson decays into two muons, resulting in the strongest hint to date of Higgs couplings to second-generation fermions. After providing the relevant scientific background and motivations, I will present the study that led to this achievement from the perspective of ATLAS, and I will briefly compare it to the CMS approach. To conclude, I will discuss the prospects for increasing the current sensitivity in the future.