Dr Chilufya Mwewa - Testing Electroweak Symmetry Breaking through Same-Charge WW Scattering at the LHC and beyond

Wednesday 20 May 2026, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/London

Online Only

https://cern.zoom.us/j/67501511814?pwd=4RlJLpbhXENmVQVLaPAbMuweQ5xIwM.1

ONLINE ONLY - NO IN PERSON MEETING ROOM

 

About the speaker: 

Chilufya Mwewa is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, where she works on the assembly and quality control of silicon strip modules for the new ATLAS Inner Tracker (ITk). She also contributes to precision measurements of the electroweak mixing angle within the ATLAS experiment.

She earned her PhD from the University of Cape Town in 2020, followed by a postdoctoral appointment at Brookhaven National Laboratory, before joining DESY in 2024. Her PhD and postdoctoral research played a key role in analyses leading to the observation and cross-section measurement of same-charge WW boson production in ATLAS. In addition to her physics analyses, she contributed to the Phase I upgrades of the ATLAS Liquid Argon Calorimeter and the Muon New Small Wheel, and also served as a run coordinator for the ATLAS Liquid Argon Calorimeter, supporting detector operations and data-taking activities.

14:00 → 15:00 Testing Electroweak Symmetry Breaking through Same-Charge WW Scattering at the LHC and beyond

Within the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics, weak vector bosons are allowed to be massive as a result of the spontaneously broken electroweak symmetry which is said to have resulted from a phase transition of the Higgs potential in the early universe. Measurements of the scattering of weak vector bosons—referred to as Vector Boson Scattering (VBS)—provide a powerful probe of the electroweak interaction and offer insight into the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking.
In this seminar, I will present recent results from the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider on the scattering of same-sign W boson pairs, including the first evidence of longitudinal polarisation in VBS. I will also discuss some prospects for these measurements at the High-Luminosity LHC and the proposed Future Circular Collider.

Convener: Dr Chilufya Mwewa (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY))