International collaboration to expand on new physics from the Large Hadron Collider

Scientists from the University of Southampton and the Henan Institute of Science and Technology in Xinxiang, China, will search for companion states to the Higgs boson in new collaborative research scheme.

Professor Stefano Moretti from Southampton’s High Energy Physics Group will work alongside the Henan Institute’s Professor Yao-Bei Liu to explore 'New Physics beyond the Standard Model', drawing upon the latest data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The collaboration, which will start in September 2018, is being funded by the China Scholarship Council (CSC) and will involve an academic visit from the China to Southampton’s Department of Physics and Astronomy.

The research builds on the highly-publicised advances of the LHC at CERN and its discovery of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics.

“This collaboration is a natural continuation of my long-term endeavour of searching for new physics beyond the Standard Model, the current description of the particle physics world,” Stefano says. “We are at a crossroad in High Energy Particle Physics. A new and exciting era has begun with the arrival of data from the experiments on the LHC. The rapid and accurate interpretation of this data will point the way to a higher level of understanding of the fundamental interactions of matter and forces, as well as possibly paving the way towards an underlying grand unified theory. I’m delighted to have the support of the CSC as we continue this journey through the search for companion states to the Higgs boson.”

The CSC funding opens the door to a long term collaboration between the UK and China operating within the framework of the NExT Institute, a body directed by Stefano Moretti that brings together theorists and experimentalists in the process of new physics discovery. Professor Yao-Bei Liu will join the NExT Institute as a Visiting Professor next September for a one-year term.

Southampton’s High Energy Physics Group studies the most elementary constituents of matter, the basic forces of nature by which they interact, and their role in the early Universe. Find out more through the research group website.