Articles
Rising Stars
Rising Stars
Ben Hodkinson was nominated by the department of Physics to talk
about his Master’s Project - “The Inert Higgs Doublet Model at
Lepton Colliders.”
The Rising Stars Symposium is an annual
student research conference organised by
the Faculty of Science. Each department in
the faculty nominates a student to present
their final-year research project, and I was
nominated by the Department of Physics
to talk about my Master's Project, titled
(The Inert Higgs Doublet Model at Lepton
Colliders).
It was an eclectic afternoon with presenta-
tions on a wide range of subjects, from the
use of deep learning algorithms to identify
an author's native language, to imaging
biological cells. My personal favourite was
a lucidly delivered talk by Grey's own Tom
Fox on a method of spatially sorting fluid
droplets for chemical synthesis.
In my talk, the abstract of which is below,
I spoke about a theory of fundamental
physics called the `Inert Doublet Model',
which explains dark matter by hypothesis-
ing four new `Higgs' particles in addition
to the one discovered at the Large Hadron
Collider in 2012. It seems I succeeded in
making these concepts accessible to the
non-specialist audience in attendance, as
I was voted the `Audience Choice Award'
for my talk. I was delighted to receive this
award given the standard of presentations,
and it was a privilege to present at the
event - it's a fascinating insight into all ar-
eas of science and the research carried out
by your fellow students. The abstract of my
talk is given below.
The Standard Model is our current funda-
mental theory, which describes the build-
ing blocks of nature. It has been incredibly
successful at predicting the results of parti-
cle physics experiments, including its latest
triumph: the ground-breaking discovery of
the Higgs boson at CERN's Large Hadron
Collider experiment (LHC) in 2012.
But there remain mysteries to be solved.
The matter that we see and currently
12
understand makes up just 5% of the 'stuff'
in the universe, leaving 95% unexplained.
25% of the unexplained 'stuff' is 'dark
matter' - a new type of invisible matter that
does not interact with light and is not in-
cluded in the Standard Model. Our current
theory is therefore incomplete.
In this talk, I will discuss a proposed solu-
tion to the dark matter problem - the
'Inert Doublet Model', which extends the
Standard Model by introducing additional
Higgs bosons, the lightest of which is a
dark matter particle.
But how do we determine if such a new
theory is correct?
One method is to search for signals of
new particles at collider experiments. To
extract a signal from the cloud of uninter-
esting background noise, the kinematics
of the particles of interest must be well
understood. I have used particle simulation
tools to simulate proposed lepton collider
experiments, and analysed the kinematics
of the new Higgs bosons predicted by the
Inert Doublet Model. Several signals that
could be separated from background noise
were found, leading to a conclusion that
there is good potential to discover new
Higgs bosons at future lepton colliders.
The strength of the signal depends on the
masses of the new Higgs particles, and I
have investigated five mass regimes and
determined the achievable signal strength
for each.
In this talk I hope to give an insight into
the problems faced by modern particle
physics, and how we are attempting to
solve them to gain a clearer view of the
fundamental workings of our universe.