Lepton interactions with protons

This proposal addresses one of the open questions of the Standard Model of particle physics, namely the properties of the neutrinos.

A major ingredient in most solutions to this puzzle is the existence of an extended Higgs sector and in particular doubly-charged scalars interacting with leptons and W bosons.

The coming run periods of the Large Hadron Collider will allow us to study a new rare interaction producing doubly-charged Higgs bosons: lepton-lepton interactions where the leptons come directly from the collliding protons.

This creates essentially background-free final states and allows us to access models with significant lepton couplings, without having to wait for the next lepton collider. To address this hypothesis we need to implement a recently developed tool with a new set of parton density functions. We also need more data and most of all higher efficiency in the selection of leptons.

Here I benefit from my extensive experience enabling precision searches with leptons.

The main idea is to improve the efficiency by developing new lepton identification algorithms that increase coverage by using regions in the experiment that are not fully instrumented.As a step on the way to discovering new Higgs bosons this project will also investigate Standard Model lepton-lepton scattering from protons with the goal of observing it for the first time and use this measurement to validate the new theoretical tools and as a potential background to the doubly-charged Higgs search.