Patrick Bryant (U. Chicago) "Measuring Higgs Pair Production at the LHC – Why and How?

Abstract:
As the universe cooled immediately following the Big Bang, the laws of physics underwent a dramatic phase transition. Underlying symmetries were broken and particles acquired mass as the Higgs field moved to a new ground state.
In this talk I will discuss why we should care about the precise nature of the electroweak phase transition (EWPT) and how the potential which generated the EWPT may be measured at the LHC.
Bio: Patrick received his B.S. in physics and mathematics at the University of Oregon in 2013 and has since been working towards his Ph.D. in experimental particle physics at the University of Chicago as a member of the ATLAS collaboration. He recently returned to Chicago after a year and a half at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland to write his thesis on hardware based track reconstruction and the search for Higgs pair production in the four b-jet final state.