More information about some of my past and current research directions.
The Higgs field plays a central role in the Standard Model: its potential has a shape such that the Higgs field acquires a vacuum expectation value which spontaneously breaks the electroweak gauge symmetry of the Standard Model, leading to the disparate nature of the fundamental forces we see at low energies. In parallel, this vacuum expectation value gives masses to the Standard Model fermions via its Yukawa couplings. The values of the Higgs couplings are thus responsible for a great deal of the structure we see in the Universe, and testing the consistency of this theory is of paramount importance in particle physics.
Moreover, there are deep, theoretical reasons to believe that the Higgs is related to physics beyond the Standard Model that would appear at or around the TeV scale. These reasons make up the (Electroweak) Hierarchy Problem: according to our best notions of effective field theory, we should not expect scalar fields to appear with masses parametrically smaller than the cutoff of the theory (where new, microsopic physics would come into play). This is exemplified in all concrete models that predict the Higgs mass: if the new physics is much heavier than the electroweak scale, a significant amount of “fine-tuning” of the parameters of the theory is required to reproduce the observed Standard Model.
For all these reasons, it is crucial to test the Higgs sector of the Standard Model at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and future machines. A significant portion of my research is in this direction: both in constructing models of BSM physics related to the Higgs and understanding their signatures at collider experiments, and in performing detailed calculations necessary to interpret experimental measurements as constraints on BSM couplings of the Higgs.
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