HET Lunch Seminar

I will discuss two related opportunities for searching for new physics with flavorful couplings to the Standard Model, both intimately related to the Higgs boson. First, I will discuss the recently observed events at the KOTO experiment, and how they could be explained by Higgs portal extensions to the Standard Model. I will then discuss the interplay of BSM flavor physics and the Higgs more generally, with an emphasis on the usual theoretical biases about how new physics may couple to the Standard Model. This will lead me to an introduction to the Spontaneous Flavor Violation (SFV) framework, which avoids some of these biases while allowing for large couplings between new physics and any SM quark generation in a robust and UV complete way. In the context of extended Higgs sectors, the SFV Ansatz leads to strikingly different phenomenology compared to typical models at both the energy and intensity frontiers, and provides strong motivation for developing new techniques such as light quark taggers at colliders. Bluejeans link:https://bluejeans.com/507765681