Vector Boson Scattering: a new toolkit to probe the standard model and beyond

Joany Andreina Manjarres Ramos | TU Dresden
Seminar room 3, 14:00

The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has invigorated the study of electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB) and confirmed once again that the Standard Model (SM) is a reliable model, at least as a first approximation. However fundamental questions remain unanswered by the SM. Some hints for our New Physics quest may be found at the heart of the SM, in the breaking of the electroweak symmetry. With the EWSB mechanism vector bosons acquire mass through their coupling to the Higgs field. At the same time, EWSB rules the scattering of vector bosons (VBS, vector boson scattering), avoiding its divergence at high energy. The rate of occurrence of VBS processes is predicted by the SM to be very low due to cancellations of different contributions. Processes related to new physics can disturb this delicate balance and lead to potentially large enhancements of the VBS rate, making it the ideal process for a model-independent test-bench of new physics at an energy scale never investigated before. The door for measuring VBS has just open. We will scrutinize the first experimental results obtained at the LHC with a partial dataset. We will also explore the potential VBS analysis have with the upcoming LHC data to ultimately test the SM at high precision or possibly hinting at new physics.

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