1. Physics Colloquium (Leona Woods Distinguished Postdoctoral Lectureship Award)

    "On top of the top: challenging the Standard Model with precise measurements of top quark properties"

    Presented by María Moreno Llácer, CERN

    Tuesday, December 18, 2018, 3:30 pm
    Large Seminar Room, Bldg. 510

    Hosted by: Andrei Nomerotski

    The understanding of the Electro-Weak Symmetry Breaking mechanism and the origin of the mass of fundamental particles is one of the most important questions in particle physics today. The top quark is unique among the known quarks since it is the heaviest fundamental particle in the Standard Model. Its large mass makes the top quark very different from all other particles, with a Yukawa coupling to the Higgs boson close to unity. For these reasons, the top quark and the Higgs boson play very special roles in the SM and in many extensions thereof. An accurate knowledge of their properties can bring key information on fundamental interactions at the electroweak breaking scale and beyond. The Large Hadron Collider is providing an enormous dataset of proton-proton collisions at the highest energies ever achieved in a laboratory. With the unprecedentedly large sample of top quarks, a new frontier has opened, the flavour physics of the top quark, allowing to study whether the Higgs field is the unique source of the top quark's mass and whether there are unexpected interactions between the top quark and the Higgs boson. The answers to these questions will shed light on what may lie beyond the Standard Model and can even have cosmological implications.