Review of Standard Model Higgs results at the ATLAS experiment

Abstract

The investigation of the mechanism of electroweak (EW) symmetry breaking has been one of the main goals of the ATLAS experiment [1] research program at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics, the breaking of the EW symmetry is realised by introducing a complex doublet scalar field which is related to the existence of a neutral particle, the Higgs boson. The Higgs scalar field is responsible of the mass of the other particles; the mass of its mediator, the Higgs boson, is the only free parameter in the theory. In 2012, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations discovered a new particle consistent with the SM Higgs boson and two years later measured its mass, in the H → γγ and H →ZZ* → 4l channels, to be mH=125.09±0.21 (stat) ±0.11 (sys) GeV with data collected in 2011 and 2012 (LHC Run 1). This document will cover the SM Higgs analyses performed with approximately 15 fb−1 of pp collision data collected until summer 2016 during the so-called Run 2 LHC data-taking at a center-of-mass energy ().