Physics Colloquium: "The Higgs Boson Gets a Boost”

The Department of Physics is pleased to welcome Jennet Dickinson, assistant professor at Cornell University, for her talk titled, "The Higgs Boson Gets a Boost.”

Bio: Jennet is an experimental particle physicist and assistant professor at Cornell University. Her research focuses on measuring high-energy Higgs boson production with the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, a proton-proton collider located on the border of France and Switzerland. Jennet did her graduate studies on the ATLAS experiment at the University of California, Berkeley, where her thesis focused on the interaction between the Higgs boson and the top quark. Jennet joined the CMS experiment as a postdoctoral Research Associate at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, IL before moving to Cornell in 2024. In her free time, Jennet enjoys reading, hiking, and crochet.

Abstract: The discovery of the Higgs boson during the first run of proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) supplied the final missing piece of the standard model of particle physics. Measurements of the Higgs boson and its interactions, especially at high energies, present the most promising avenue to discover new physics at the LHC. The decay of a Higgs boson to a bottom-antibottom quark pair - H(bb) - has historically been a challenging channel for precision measurements. However, developments in jet substructure and flavor tagging algorithms since the Higgs discovery have made H(bb) a powerful channel for studying the boosted hadronic jet topology that is characteristic of a high energy H(bb) decay. Tools for identifying boosted H(bb) events will be discussed, and recent measurement of Higgs boson production at high transverse momentum will be presented.