Organized by: Prof. Lu Lu

Events on Friday, December 7th, 2018

Higgs and Dark Matter: Absence of Evidence != Evidence of Absence?

Time: 1:00 pm

Place: 5280 Chamberlin Hall

Speaker: Prof Nausheen Shah, Fermilab

Abstract: Since the Higgs discovery in 2012, the LHC has not found any
conclusive evidence for the presence of New Physics (NP) at the weak
scale. While there are stringent limits on strongly interacting NP, the
weakly interacting sector is minimally constrained. In addition, dark
matter direct detection experiments have been putting increasingly
stringent bounds on the cross sections of dark matter particles
scattering off nuclei. This has led to wide spread pessimism regarding
the WIMP paradigm, and most well studied SUSY models such as the MSSM or
the NMSSM. I take a different view point. What if the lack of evidence,
instead of being due to absence of NP at the weak scale, is actually
telling us where NP could be hiding? In that spirit I will discuss the
implications for an extended Higgs sector of a SM-like Higgs in generic
2HDMs+, using the NMSSM as motivation. Next I will talk about the
possible connections of 2HDMs with dark matter using an EFT formulation,
particularly focusing on the connotations of null signals in direct
detection experiments. Finally, I will discuss some tantalizing recent
results from electroweakino searches at the LHC, showing how these may
be consistent with astrophysical observations, and fit naturally in the
MSSM/NMSSM setup.

Host: Kevin Black

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