Nikola L. Whallon (Advisor: Shih-Chieh Hsu), University of Washington
Monday, April 25, 2016 - 12:30pm to 1:30pm
PAB B305
Searching for Dark Matter with the Higgs Boson and the ATLAS Detector
I will present my thesis plans to search for dark matter pair produced in association with a Higgs boson decaying to two b-quarks with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. This process, called "mono-Higgs,"
results in large missing transverse energy in the detector and a boosted Higgs reconstructed via advanced jet techniques. My work will include the development of a novel boosted Higgs tagger which relies on variable radius (VR) track jet reconstruction to improve the mono-Higgs search sensitivity. If no signal is detected, limits will be set on the model parameters of a number of effective field theory (EFT) and simplified dark matter mono-Higgs models.