Dr. Stephane Cooperstein will present his topics “Revealing the secrets of the Higgs boson: progress and prospects,” in-person.

Abstract:
The Higgs boson is a particle unlike any other we have ever observed and it plays a central role in the standard model (SM) theory of particle physics, which has been remarkably successful but is incomplete (dark matter, gravity, matter-antimatter asymmetry, etc.). With many theories offering extensions to the SM, it is most likely that experiments will deliver the next breakthrough and studying the properties of the Higgs boson in detail is one of the most promising avenues in this pursuit. In this talk I will highlight some of the most recent progress on this front by the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC. I will begin with the first evidence for the rare Higgs boson decay to muons, achieved more than five years earlier than expected largely due to the development of novel analysis strategies that included extensive use of machine learning (ML) techniques. I will then highlight the importance of searches for Higgs boson pair production (HH) and describe a variety of innovative ML-driven methods we developed that have accelerated our HH search program, one of the primary LHC physics objectives for the next decades.