Neutrinos—the "little neutral ones" initially conjectured by Pauli in the 1930s—have been eluding scientists since their inception. Even some basic properties, such as their mass, escape experimental confirmation. In my talk, I will discuss how two relatively new quantum-inspired techniques — such cyclotron radiation emission spectroscopy (CRES)-- are being used to better understand the fundamental properties of neutrinos to new, unprecedented levels.
We know that the Standard Model of particle physics is not complete, pointing to the existence of as of yet unknown particles referred to broadly as "new physics". Beauty quarks are the heaviest quarks to hadronise. Precision measurements of observable from beauty quark decays therefore offer a unique probe of the new physics landscape above the TeV scale. In particular, measurements of very rare beauty decays could detect new physics particles with masses of hundreds of TeV. For the last decade, rare beauty decays have shown persist and consistent deviations at the level, of four to five standard deviations from Standard Model expectations. This talk summarises the status of these measurements , and the ongoing work to pin down what is behind these anomalies.
I will discuss a novel technique to perform statistical data analysis. The method is a specific implementation of simulation-based inference for parameter inference in particle and nuclear physics experiments. I will show a real-life application of the new method to a measurement of the Higgs boson width in the H->ZZ->4l decay channel. The application of the new method improves the evidence for off-shell Higgs boson production by almost a factor of two using the same dataset as a previous histogram-based analysis.
