Title: 
Top physics: the portal to LHC discovery
   
Speaker: 
Freya Blekman, IIHE, Vrije Universiteit Brussel 

Abstract: 
The top quark is the heaviest known elementary particle and was
discovered only in 1995. Due to its extremely large mass of 173
GeV, equivalent to a Gold atom, the top quark has the largest
Yukawa coupling to the Standard Model Higgs boson and is also
extremely sensitive to subtle and not-so-subtle signs of physics beyond
the Standard Model.
After providing a historical perspective on the strategies and
techniques that are used to identify the elusive top quarks, I will
present how the Compact Muon Solenoid collaboration has constrained BSM
in the top quark sector. These searches for new physics are using
cutting edge analysis techniques to reconstruct the extremely busy
and/or also highly boosted final states that are created when top
quarks are produced at the LHC. I will focus on the most recent
results from the CMS experiment, using data collected in
proton-proton collisions at the LHC at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV.