Babis Anastasiou(ETH Zürich), Frank Petriello(UW Madison), Jose Santiago(ETH Zurich), Thomas Gehrmann(Univ. Zürich), Zoltan Kunszt(ETH Zürich)
Description
The first beams of protons have already circulated in the Large Hadron Collider. The main goal of the LHC experiments is to probe the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking and to discover the Higgs boson. If the Standard Model is correct, a discovery is anticipated in the first two years of LHC operation.
The discovery and detailed study of the Higgs boson is of outmost importance. It is the only sector of the Standard Model that has not been experimentally confirmed yet and, due to its prominent role in electroweak symmetry breaking, it is especially sensitive to any new physics that could explain in a satisfactory way the stability of the electroweak scale against higher energy corrections. It is nevertheless going to be a challenging task, that will require the ingenuity and hard work of many specialists of different areas in particle physics, from experimenters to experts in perturbative QCD calculations, Monte-Carlo generators and model builders.
The Center for Theoretical Studies in Zürich organises this workshop with the aim to bring together all these specialists in order to prepare the community for the challenges which will be posed in the search for Higgs boson(s) and the understanding of experimental results amid their discovery. We have witnessed a rapid progress in the field during the last few years. A wealth of recent refined theoretical predictions for Higgs boson cross-sections and novel features in experimental signals originating from extensions of the Standard Model can be discussed and new research directions can be explored.