Yang Ma is defending a dissertation titled, “Electroweakand Higgs physics at high energies” on Tuesday, April 19th at 12:30pm (est), (RSVP brandis@pitt.edu). The dissertation was advised by Dr. Tao Han (chair/advisor). 

Electroweakand Higgs physics at high energies

The establishment of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics is one of the most successful achievements in modern physics, which provides an elegant theoretical framework to describe the behaviors and interactions of elementary particles.

To better understand the SM and to look for the hint for the new physics beyond the SM (BSM), we need to study the electroweak (EW) physics very precisely at high-energy colliders. We layout the EW parton distribution function (EW PDF) framework and show how the PDF evolution is done. Within the EW PDF framework, we also show the SM expectations at future high-energy lepton colliders and calculate the QCD jet background for a possible multi-TeV high-energy muon collider.

One of the most important particles in the SM is the Higgs boson, which is closely related to the EW symmetry breaking and generates the mass for the other elementary particles. We suggest a possible approach to measure the Muon-Higgs coupling using the multi-boson production processes at a possible multi-TeV muon collider and show the possibility to determine the coupling to a 10% level accuracy. We also calculate the Higgs to charmonia decays which allow testing the Charm-Higgs coupling to a 10% level accuracy.