The Higgs Boson & Beyond

Coordinators: Lance Dixon

On July 4, 2012, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of the Higgs Boson, culminating an almost fifty-year journey since this particle was predicted theoretically in the early 1960's.  The Higgs boson is the last piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, and also explains how elementary particles get their mass.  Yet its discovery leaves open many questions which the Standard Model fails to answer. They can be explored at the current, higher energy run of the LHC, which began in mid-2015 and provides the world's highest energy particle collisions.  The open questions include: Is the particle that was discovered exactly the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model, or could it be a portal to new particles and interactions? How precisely can we measure its properties, and what new theoretical ideas might help with this task?  Can we make dark matter at the LHC? What other theories answer questions left open by the Standard Model, and how will we be testing them at the LHC?  This conference will explain how particle theorists and experimentalists are working together to answer these pressing questions about the nature of matter.