Title: A Tale of Two Higgs Bosons
Speaker: Irene Dutta (FNAL)
Abstract:  The Higgs Boson plays a pivotal role in our understanding of the fundamental forces of nature, and is very unique as it is the only known scalar boson in the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. The Higgs field is also responsible for the spontaneous symmetry breaking of the electroweak vacuum and providing masses to the gauge bosons. An essential ingredient to this mechanism is the Higgs potential, which is introduced ad-hoc and assumed to be Mexican-hat shaped in the SM, but cannot be derived from first principles. It is therefore important to probe this shape experimentally.The double Higgs production (HH) is uniquely sensitive to the structure of the Higgs potential and will allow us to understand the stability of the electroweak vacuum and possibly the origins of matter anti-matter asymmetry in our universe. However, the HH process has a very low production rate of ~32 fb in pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV. In this talk, I will describe the challenges of finding this rare process and the innovative methods employed by the CMS experiment at the LHC to search for this process. I will also briefly discuss the prospects of observing this rare process and constraining the shape of the Higgs potential at future particle colliders.