Search for New Physics at Present and Near Future

Speaker: Hai-Jun Yang, University of Michigan

When: February 4, 2008 (Mon), 03:00PM to 04:00PM (add to my calendar)
Location: PRB 595

This event is part of the HEE Seminar Series.

Abstract: Evidence for new physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) has come in the last decade from the confirmation of neutrino oscillations, now confirmed by many experiments. This talk will present recent results from the MiniBooNE Experiment, designed to confirm or refute the apparent neutrino oscillation signal from the LSND Experiment, an anomaly that cannot be explained in a framework of only three neutrino flavors. I will describe different analyses using track-based and boosted-decision-tree (BDT) techniques. The MiniBooNE data exclude the LSND result, but also indicate an unexpected excess at low neutrino energies.

Exciting new physics in the next decade is expected to come from the energy frontier experiments, ATLAS and CMS, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. There will be not only targeted searches, such as for the SM Higgs particle, but also global searches that cover many possible new physics channels with similar experimental signatures, such as multi-lepton and multi-boson. I will describe the “physics commissioning” for the ATLAS Experiment, focusing on diboson physics studies through multi-lepton final states. A particular example of the Higgs search through the WW final state using the BDT technique developed by the Michigan group will be presented. This method is expected to have significantly better sensitivity for discovery compared to a conventional analysis based on fixed selection cuts.