Beyond the Standard Model: New Perspectives

The Standard Model of particle physics, while providing an excellent description of experimental data, leaves key observations unexplained, most notably the existence of dark matter. It also raises deep theoretical puzzles, such as the instability of the Higgs mass in the presence of heavy physics. As conventional solutions to these problems have not emerged at the expected energy scales, it is now crucial to rethink our approach towards physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM). This talk gathers my latest efforts to explore BSM beyond the standard paradigm.

In the first part, I will revisit long-standing expectations for new physics near the electroweak scale. I will show that non-minimal versions of traditional models can point to novel and unexplored regions of parameter space, while maintaining their original purpose. I will also discuss novel strategies based on effective field theory to probe more exotic origins of the Higgs boson. In the second part, I will turn to BSM scenarios characterized by more feeble interactions. I will discuss novel aspects of QCD axion phenomenology arising from its interplay with additional scalar fields, which reshape the landscape of axion dark matter searches.

Throughout the talk, I will emphasize the importance of refining the map between data and a given particle physics model, to fully explore the unprecedent data which will be gathered by future collider and astrophysical experiments.