Speaker: Victor Gehman, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Abstract: At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we have found the last critical piece of the Standard Model, the long sought for Higgs Boson. As we complete our understanding of the details of this model, there is a growing anxiety that there may be no new physics beyond the Standard Model, or that the new physics may only manifest at energies so high as to be practically unreachable. We do, however have several hints of new physics, and I will make the case that our next steps in understanding it are eminently doable. Much of these hints of new physics can be further explored with the construction of large (for varying definitions of "large") detectors deep underground. I will focus on the search for dark matter with two-phase xenon-filled time projection chambers under the guise of LUX and LZ, and briefly touch on opportunities stemming from future detectors built for long-baseline neutrino experiments. The physics program discussed here has a broad and interesting reach and will be instrumental in furthering our understanding of the Universe and guiding our expansion of the Standard Model in the years to come.