F(ℓ)avoured searches: new physics in the 3rd generation

by Tamara Vazquez-Schröder (CERN)

Monday 30 Oct 2023, 12:00 → 13:30 Europe/Madrid

IFAE Seminar Room + Zoom (Hybrid Seminar)

"The primary goal of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been to discover the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB). The discovery of the Standard Model (SM)-like Higgs boson in 2012 was the first step to achieve this. However, the underlying nature of EWSB remains unknown. Additionally, the SM cannot explain the origin of neutrino masses, the asymmetry between matter and antimatter in our universe, or the nature of dark matter and dark energy. It also cannot address important conceptual questions, such as why is the Higgs boson so light compared to the Planck scale, or what are the underlying dynamics through which the Higgs field provides masses to the fundamental particles. Even though the LHC has not discovered any Beyond the Standard Model physics, there are multiple hints in various areas of particle physics which could revolutionise our understanding of the elementary particles and the forces between them, leading to the start of a new Higgs and Flavour Era. In this talk I will dive into promising new physics models coupled preferentially to 3rd generation quarks or leptons that could address some of the shortcomings of the SM and could potentially explain some of the observed tensions in the particle physics landscape. Being potentially at the reach of the LHC collision energy, the search for these new physics signals in the multilepton final state could be the key to access a new phase in particle physics exploration."

Short bio
Tamara Vazquez-Schröder received her Diploma degree in Physics at the University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain, and did her PhD on top quark physics at the University of Göttingen, Germany. She worked as a post-doc with the University of McGill, Montreal, Canada until 2018; she was a CERN Research Fellow from 2018 to 2020, and she is currently CERN Research LD Staff. She has lead the tt̄H and tH analyses from 2019 to 2021 and the exotics searches for new physics with leptons from 2021 to 2022. She is currently leading the exotics searches within the ATLAS Collaboration.