HET Brown Bag Series | The Quest for New Physics: From Atomic Physics to the LHC

The Standard Model of particle physics well describes a vast number of observables up to the TeV scale. However, it cannot be a complete description of Nature as it cannot explain various experimental observations. For example, it lacks a viable dark matter candidate and can neither explain the observed matter/antimatter asymmetry of our Universe nor neutrino oscillations. Thus, physics beyond the Standard Model is well motivated. In this seminar, we explore different methods to probe new physics at multiple energy scales, from high energy colliders, such as the LHC, to precision low energy experiments. In particular, we focus on searches for new force carriers at the LHCb experiment and in precision atomic spectroscopy. We show that the inclusive search for dark photons at the LHCb experiment already probes new parameter space and can be easily interpreted for a large variety of new physics models. On the precision frontier, we explore the potential of isotope shift spectroscopy to probe new long range force carriers.