How many new particles do we need after the Higgs boson?

by Dr Marco Drewes (TUM)

Tuesday 12 Jul 2016, 16:15 → 17:15 Europe/Berlin

Auditorium (MPI fuer Physik)

The discovery of the Higgs boson completes the experimental confirmation of the particles predicted by the Standard Model, which achieves to describe almost all phenomena observed in nature in terms of a few symmetry principles and a handful of numbers, the constants of nature. Neutrino oscillations are the only confirmed piece of evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model found in the laboratory. They can be explained if the neutrinos have partners with right handed chirality like all other fermions. Remarkably, right handed neutrinos can simultaneously explain two long standing puzzles from cosmology, namely Dark Matter and the baryon asymmetry of the universe, and the Standard Model plus right handed neutrinos could be a complete effective theory of nature up to the Planck scale. This theoretical framework provides strong motivation to search for sterile neutrino Dark Matter experimentally and in astronomical observations.

Slides MPP_colloquium.pdf