The Academic Council of HBNI has conferred the Outstanding Doctoral Student Award-2021 in Physical Sciences to Dr. Avik Banerjee of Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics. Dr. Banerjee completed his Ph.D work under the guidance of Prof. Gautam Bhattacharyya.

Thesis Title : Composite Higgs and Physics Beyond the Standard Model

Abstract :

The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics, despite its all glories and successes, suffers from serious limitations in both theoretical and observational frontiers. The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012 brought a closure to the SM particle content. But lingering theoretical issues like the stability of the weak scale, or the existence of hypercharge Landau pole at some trans-Planckian scale, suggest that the SM has an ultraviolet cut-off. On the other hand, observational facts including the existence of non-zero neutrino mass and dark matter, are the primary motivations for investigating the physics beyond the SM (BSM). However, the continued absence of new physics at collider experiments complemented with lack of any pointers from astrophysical observations have significantly squeezed the window for new physics. At this crisis point of understanding the nature of the fundamental interactions, two important questions related to the limitations of the Standard Model are investigated in this thesis. First, the issue of the stability of the weak scale also known as the hierarchy problem is tackled with a composite pseudo Goldstone Higgs boson. The current status of the Higgs physics in light of the latest data from the LHC is thoroughly investigated with an emphasis to probe the composite Higgs models at the collider experiment. Finally, a novel dark matter production mechanism, motivated by the scarcity of any experimental signatures is studied.