High Energy / Nuclear Theory / RIKEN Seminars

[RIKEN Lunch Seminar] Electric dipole moments in the era of the LHC

by Jordy de Vries (University of Massachusetts Amherst, Riken BNL)

US/Eastern
2-160 (Bldg. 510)

2-160

Bldg. 510

Description

The search for an understanding of fundamental particle physics that goes beyond the Standard Model (SM) has grown into a worldwide titanic effort. Low-energy precision experiments are complementary to collider searches and, in certain cases, can even probe higher energy scales directly. However, the interpretation of a potential signal, or lack thereof, is complicated because of the non-perturbative nature of low-energy QCD. I will use the search for electric dipole moments (EDMs), which aims to discover beyond-the-SM CP violation, as an example to illustrate these difficulties and how they can be overcome by combining (chiral) effective field theory and lattice QCD. I discuss how EDM experiments involving complex systems like nucleons, nuclei, atoms, and molecules constrain possible CP-violating interactions involving the Higgs boson, how these constraints match up to direct LHC searches, and the relevance of and strategies for the improvement of the hadronic and nuclear theory.