Frederica Darema Lecture: Dr. Caterina Vernieri, Assistant Professor, SLAC
A "cool" route to unveil the Higgs boson’s secrets
The Higgs boson was discovered in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the world’s most powerful particle collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. This particle plays a unique role in fundamental physics. It gives all of the known elementary particles, including itself, their masses. While we now have a strong evidence that the Higgs field is indeed the unique source of mass for the known elementary particles, the next step is to search for new interactions that could also explain why the Higgs field has the properties required by the Standard Model of particle physics. We have no clear roadmap to this new theory but the Higgs boson plays a crucial role in this quest. The goal of a next-generation e+e- collider is to carry out precision measurements to per-cent level of the Higgs boson properties that are not accessible at the LHC and HL-LHC. In this talk we present the study of a new concept for a high gradient, high power accelerator, the Cool Copper Collider (C^3), that could provide a rapid route to precision Higgs physics with a compact footprint. The exploitation of the complementarity between LHC and future colliders will be the key to understanding fundamentally the Higgs boson.
Caterina Vernieri received her PhD from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, in 2014 and then moved to Chicago for a postdoctoral fellowship on the CMS experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. She joined SLAC in 2018 as a Panofsky Fellow-- moving to the ATLAS experiment-- and in 2022 she became an Assistant Professor. Throughout this time, she has been devoted to studying the Higgs boson using data from the LHC. She co-led the group in the CMS experiment studying the Higgs decay to b quarks at the time that this important decay process was finally discovered in the data. At SLAC, Caterina is focusing on Higgs physics. She is also responsible for the integration activities at SLAC of the new ATLAS Pixel Inner Tracker detector. She was also co-convener of the group on Higgs boson properties in Snowmass: the U.S. national study of the future of particle physics.
Reminder-- please join us in person if at all possible for this special *sponsored* lecture series visitor!
[If you really cannot make it, the Zoom information is the usual colloquium one:
Zoom: https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/94138530507?pwd=YVBlNERSbHdoNkkxSnUrVU5zOFl2Zz09
Meeting ID: 941 3853 0507Passcode: 277453 ]
