Cancelled: Physics Colloquium

Please note that self-served coffee and cookies will be in the seminar lounge at 3:00 pm. Abstract: As the most recently discovered and thus least studied fundamental particle, the Higgs boson offers enormous opportunity for continuing to understand the fundamental forces and particles that make up our Universe. With the Higgs boson mass of 125 GeV the vacuum sits very close to the border of stable and metastable, which may be a hint to deeper physics beyond the Standard Model. The Higgs potential also plays an important role in ideas about the cosmological constant or dark energy that drives the accelerating expansion of the Universe, the mysterious dark matter that comprises about 80% of the matter component in the Universe, as well as a possible phase transition in the early Universe that might be responsible for baryogenesis. Present measurements at the Large Hadron Collider are focused on testing the Higgs boson's couplings to other elementary particles, precision measurements of the Higgs boson's properties and initial investigation of the Higgs boson's self-interaction and shape of the Higgs potential. I will discuss two new measurements that will help shed light on some of these questions and can direct future searches and finish with a brief look on what's to come.