Invisible Decays of the Higgs Boson at CMS: Dark Matter and More

Note: *Coffee will be reserved in the lounge at 3:00PM.
Speaker: Zeynep Demiragli, Boston University, Physics Department

When: November 27, 2018 (Tue), 03:30PM to 04:30PM (add to my calendar)
Location: SCI 109
Hosted by: Kenneth Lane
View the poster for this event.

This event is part of the Physics Department Colloquia Series.

The experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN are at the energy frontier of particle physics, searching for answers to fundamental questions of nature. In particular, dark matter presents strong evidence for physics beyond the standard model. In this talk, I will describe searches for invisible decays of the 125 GeV Higgs boson, predicted by several dark matter models. Although the observed 125 GeV boson is compatible with the standard model Higgs boson, a large branching fraction to beyond the standard model (BSM) states is also compatible with the current data. Searches for such BSM states can be carried out with the CMS experiment using missing energy signatures, exploiting various production modes: gluon-gluon fusion, vector-boson fusion, and vector-boson associated production. Lastly, I will also discuss the prospects for discovering invisible decays of the Higgs boson at the Run-3 of the LHC and the High Luminosity-LHC.