Kaitlin Salyer: Department Seminar- A Search for Flavor Changing Neutral Current Interactions of the Top Quark and Higgs Boson

  • Starts: 3:30 pm on Thursday, February 9, 2023
  • Ends: 6:00 pm on Thursday, February 9, 2023
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest particle accelerator and a lab for high energy particle physics. Notably, in 2012, the LHC announced that the Higgs Boson had been observed at two of its major experiments, including the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). We are now in an era of particle physics where the Higgs boson can be used to probe theories of physics be- yond the Standard Model (BSM). In particular, flavor changing neutral current (FCNC) interactions, such as a top quark decaying to a Higgs boson and an up or charm quark, are processes greatly suppressed in the Standard Model. The Standard Model predicted cross section for these interactions is on the order of 10−15 fb, which is too rare to be observed with the LHC. This means that any observance of FCNC interactions would be evidence of BSM physics. The presented analysis sets upper limits on the tHq coupling constant, using data collected at CMS during 2016-2018. In this talk, I will present my search for FCNC in leptonic final states, which utilizes robust, data-driven background estimation methods and multivariate techniques to improve our results.
Location:
PRB 595
Speaker
Kaitlin Salyer
Institution
BU
Host
Indara Suarez