Title: Understanding the Higgs Boson and Top Quark at the LHC

Speaker:Peter Onyisi (UT Austin)

Abstract: The two heaviest known fundamental particles are the Higgs boson and the top quark, and their behaviour and properties are intimately intertwined – the Higgs boson gives the top quark its mass, and the top quark determines the potential energy of the Higgs field that fills space. Understanding the relationship of the two is critical for understanding fundamental particle physics both now and right after the Big Bang. The Large Hadron Collider is the first accelerator that produces both particles in sufficiently copious quantities for us to study their interactions directly in a lab setting, and we now have a sufficiently large dataset to begin study. I will outline the latest results from the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC exploring this sector of fundamental physics.