Physics programme

The FCC-ee is projected to produce about two million top quarks, more than a million Higgs bosons, more than two hundred million W bosons, and trillions of Z bosons. These extensive numbers of clean collisions will allow for a broad study of particle interactions at the precision frontier.

Accurate identification of hadronic final states is crucial for harnessing the physics potential of collider experiments. At the FCC-ee, the pristine experimental environment, devoid of effects such as QCD ISR and PDFs, simplifies flavor tagging significantly compared to the (HL-)LHC, promising substantial improvements.

UZH develops flavor tagging algorithms using cutting-edge machine learning tools to open the avenue to, for example, precision measurements of the strange quark. We evaluate the performance of these taggers using simulations of different detector designs and layouts to steer the development of the FCC-ee experiments.

The UZH group is also performing physics case studies that investigate the physics potential of FCC-ee, especially given our flavor tagging developments above and connecting to our detector R&D efforts. We thus focus on channels that require the precise reconstruction of secondary and tertiary vertices (e.g. rare flavor physics processes also connecting to the UZH theory groups) and precision timing for superior particle identification and beyond.