Grant: Subatomic Physics Envelope - Individual

My objective in this proposal is to study "exotic" extensions of the Higgs sector of the Standard Model of particle physics.  The Higgs sector is the set of particles responsible for the generation of the mass of the fundamental particles; its physical manifestation, a Higgs boson, was first discovered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in 2012.  Two of the main focuses of Large Hadron Collider experiments since then have been (1) the measurement of the properties of the discovered Higgs boson and (2) searches for possible additional Higgs bosons that would indicate an extended (or non-minimal) version of the Higgs sector.  My work focuses on the theoretical study of such extended Higgs sectors.  In particular, I work on "exotic" Higgs sector extensions, that contain Higgs bosons that are not simply a replication of the simplest Standard Model isospin-doublet Higgs field.  The purpose of this work is first to constrain the (a priori near infinite) possible variety of exotic Higgs fields, and then to identify those experimental signatures that appear in common across the majority of theoretically-acceptable exotic Higgs sectors, so that searches for these signatures can be prioritized by the experimentalists working at the Large Hadron Collider and other experiments.  An important aspect of this work is writing open-source computer software that will allow experimentalists to accurately simulate the features of the exotic Higgs bosons, so that they can design effective experimental search strategies.  The ultimate aim of this work is to be able to say with certainty whether exotic Higgs fields play any role in generating the masses of the fundamental particles.