DeCAF Seminar Series:

Abstract: I will present an overview of Higgs physics at the LHC and how precision measurements of the Higgs boson, together with searches for additional scalar particles, provide powerful probes of physics beyond the SM. Many well-motivated extensions of the Higgs sector link collider phenomenology directly to the early Universe. Extended Higgs sectors can accommodate viable Higgs-portal dark matter scenarios that can be probed at the LHC. Moreover, by altering the nature of the electroweak phase transition, a non-minimal Higgs sector can provide the conditions to dynamically generate the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe and leave observable imprints in the form of primordial gravitational waves. I will discuss how incorporating the full wealth of current and future LHC data is essential to obtain realistic, data-driven predictions for complementary observations at space-based gravitational-wave observatories like LISA.

Speaker Bio: Thomas Biekötter is a theoretical physicist currently based at the Instituto de Física Teórica (IFT). He obtained his PhD in 2019 from the IFT. Following his doctorate, he held postdoctoral positions at DESY Hamburg (Germany) as part of the Quantum Universe excellence cluster, and at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany). Since November 2024, he has been a postdoctoral researcher at the IFT as a La Caixa Junior Leader fellow. His research focuses on physics beyond the Standard Model, with particular emphasis on connecting collider experiments and gravitational wave observations to probe hidden sectors and new fundamental phenomena.