Higgs and Heavy Meson Lattice Spectroscopy

Lattice simulations are a first principles method of numerically studying the spectrum of bound states. In quantum chromodynamics (QCD), lattice simulations have had tremendous success in accurately calculating the hadron spectrum. They also provide a non-perturbative description of the Higgs mechanism, where spontaneously broken gauge symmetry is substituted by Higgs-confinement complementarity.

Presented are studies of two different sectors of the standard model of particle physics using the latest methods in lattice spectroscopy. A search for exotic states in the SU(2)-Higgs model is performed using a variational analysis. All parameters are tuned to match their experimental values, including the recently discovered Higgs mass. A vast spectrum of multi-particle states is found and all are consistent with weakly interacting Higgs and W bosons, with no exotic candidates. In the QCD sector, the spectrum of heavy mesons that contain at least one bottom quark is extracted using free-form smearing. A new "minimal-path" implementation is introduced which maintains the usefulness of the original free-form smearing method and reduces its computational time dramatically. First lattice results of assorted radially and orbitally excited bottomonium and bottom-charm meson masses are presented. Calculations of the bottom-strange and bottom-up/down mesons are also performed. The methodology and results presented within are a significant contribution to the field of lattice spectroscopy.