Probing the Atomic Higgs Force and Beyond

by Gilad Perez (Weizmann Institute)

Wednesday 6 Apr 2016, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

4/3-006 - TH Conference Room (CERN)

We begin by arguing that we do not yet know whether light fermion masses originate from the Higgs mechanism, which especially in view of the flavor puzzle lead to a basic research problem. We then briefly review the LHC reach and conclude that only limited progress can be made on this frontier. It motivates us to propose an approach to probe Higgs boson couplings to the building blocks of matter: the electron and the up and down quarks, with precision measurement of isotope shifts in atomic clock transitions. We show that the attractive Higgs force between nuclei and their bound electrons induces measurable non-linearities in a King plot of two isotope shifts. We present an experimental method which, given state-of-the-art accuracy in frequency comparison, competes with and potentially surpasses the Large Hadron Collider in bounding the Higgs-to-light-fermion couplings. Better knowledge of the latter is an important test of the Standard Model which could lead, besides the establishment of new physics above the weak scale, to an alternative understanding of the flavor puzzle. We then discuss how to translate the above, potential, fantastic sensitivity to constrain heavy new physics, including among others, that of a 750 GeV diphoton resonance.