Speaker
Merlin Goddard
(TTU)
Description
The longitudinal polarization state of massive vector bosons, arising from the electroweak symmetry breaking, provides a direct opportunity to probe the Higgs mechanism. Transverse polarization states exist for massless bosons, whereas longitudinal polarization is only made possible through the Higgs mechanism; the same interaction which gives these bosons their mass. We present an approach to extracting this helicity information using machine learning to identify these polarized W and Z bosons as different states, with the goal of analytically testing against the Standard Model prediction. Observing a difference between the theoretical values and data would open the door to new physics beyond the Standard Model.
Primary author
Merlin Goddard
(TTU)
