July 16, 2013 (Tuesday) Rahul Sinha, Institute of Mathematical Science, Chennai, India
The Higgs boson is believed to have been discovered at the Large Hadron Collider. The task now is not only to verify accurately whether the boson is indeed the scalar Higgs as proposed in the Standard Model of particle physics but to study its properties in detail. We present a step by step methodology to determine the properties of this resonance without making any assumptions about its couplings. We present the analysis in terms of measurements that would require the minimum number of events. We show that by studying the three uni-angular distributions and other readily measurable observables, one can unambiguously confirm whether the new boson is indeed the Higgs with J^{PC} = 0^{++} and with couplings to Z bosons exactly as predicted in the Standard Model. We also show how possible deviations in the couplings of Higgs to vector bosons can be observed.
4pm, 472 Willamette Hall
Host: Nilendra Deshpande