Research Projects

New Physics (NP) beyond the Standard Model (SM) is long sought-after for several reasons like neutrino mass generation or that for a suitable Dark Matter (DM) candidate, including the quest for the correct Electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism in operation. However no NP signal excess has been confirmed yet. The project proposes to look closely into several such NP possibilities including Higgs boson production, DM searches etc. at the on-going Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and study their prospects in future electron-positron collider sensitivities. Notably, the signal contributions may arise from heavy NP, beyond the reach of the collider via higher dimensional Effective (EFT) operators or that from an UV complete set up, both of which we plan to address, but focusing on EFT. Specifically, we will look into how optimally the NP couplings (or Wilson coefficients of the EFT operators) can be probed via Optimal Observable Technique (OOT), a powerful tool by which the covariance matrix is rendered minimal in an experimental set up. The OOT analyses have mostly been done in signal only hypothesis so far, where the inclusion of the SM background contamination turns crucial. We aim to find a correlation between optimal sensitivity of NP coupling to that of signal significance. Such optimisation can be contrasted to the usual experimental statistical estimation, so that we know how far one can go by SM background reduction via both cut-based analysis and machine learning techniques. Beyond collider searches, we plan to address the issue of optimal estimation of DM-SM couplings in direct search experiments for DM as well.