Finally, after a few warm-up meetings among the PIs of be.h to talk about practical matters and hiring strategy, we started talking Physics!
The first scientific meeting of the EoS be.h project took place on Thursday 22 March 2018 in Brussels. We gathered to exchange ideas and share our vision and ambition for work package 2, “Higgs coupling studies and interpretation in the standard model effective field theory”.
In this work package, chaired by Pascal Vanlaer of ULB and Andrea Giammanco of UCL, the properties of the recently-discovered Brout-Englert-Higgs boson and its interactions with the top quark, with the W and Z bosons, and with itself, are studied with a novel angle of attack. We are looking for a consistent set of deviations from the predictions of the standard model of particle physics in the data of the proton-proton collider LHC, the most powerful collider worldwide, based at CERN, which continues to deliver plenty of high-quality data.
After the introductory slides by Pascal, who reminded us of the goals that we set in our EoS proposal and pointed out the complementarities between currently disconnected analysis efforts, the stage was taken by three speakers who reviewed the situation for the experimental studies of the Higgs couplings. Hugues Brun of ULB talked about the connection between the Higgs and the heavy gauge bosons (W and Z), followed by Kirill Skovpen (VUB) about the top-Higgs connection, and finally Pieter David (UCL) closed the loop by reporting about the gauge bosons association with the top quark.
We concluded with a long and fruitful round table, and the wish to meet again in a couple of months from now.
be-h.be 