Majorana neutrino discovery strategy with CMS

ended

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is successfully operating at a record-breaking energy and is expected to deliver an enormous dataset of 300/fb of proton-proton collisions in the next 6 years. I propose to take advantage of both the unprecedented collision energy and the large number of events to be recorded in order to search for signs of new particles which could uncover the nature of dark matter, provide an explanation for the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe or answer questions about the origin of neutrino masses. To achieve this, I will build on my expertise devising and organizing new physics searches with leptons and will establish and lead a new multi-signature research programme at the CMS experiment. This programme will exploit both the intensity and energy frontiers opening up at the LHC and can be further expanded at the high-luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). Since the masses and couplings of the new particles are unconstrained, my proposed search strategy will be such that a wide mass range will be covered also encompassing many orders of magnitude in the coupling strength.