Anja Vest - Vector Boson Scattering and Anomalous Gauge Couplings

The validity of today's Standard Model of particle physics has been confirmed in numerous experiments over the past decades. The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 ushered in a new era of particle physics and could possibly complete our understanding of the Standard Model of electroweak interactions.
The Standard Model predicts that the Higgs boson couples to the messenger particles of the weak interaction. Furthermore, also triple and quartic couplings of these gauge or vector bosons among each other are postulated. Of particular importance is therefore the vector boson scattering process to which the Higgs boson contributes significantly since it regularizes this process.

The exploration of such vector boson scattering processes thus provides a deep insight into the nature of the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism, complementary to the directly studying the Higgs boson and its properties.

With the data from the first run period of the Large Hadron Collider now for the very first time a signature of the scattering of electroweak gauge bosons has been observed. Simultaneously this is also the first experimental indication of their postulated quartic coupling.

In addition, with these data it is possible to test to which extent these quartic gauge couplings correspond to the Standard Model predictions, or whether here new physics beyond the Standard Model shows up.