First Characterization of New Physics at the LHC

Speaker: Natalia Toro, Stanford University

When: February 9, 2009 (Mon), 12:30PM to 01:30PM (add to my calendar)

This event is part of the HET Seminar Series.

Abstract:
Low-energy SUSY predicts pair-production at the LHC of particles with Standard Model quantum numbers that decay to jets, missing energy, and possibly leptons (as do several other theories). If an excess of such events is seen in LHC data, a theoretical framework in which to describe it will be essential to constraining the structure of the new physics. I will introduce four deliberately simplified models, each specified by only 2-3 masses and 4-5 branching ratios, for use in a first characterization of data. Despite their simplicity, these models capture many features of a wide range of SUSY models. Fits of these simplified models to the data furnish a quantitative presentation of the jet structure, electroweak decays, and heavy-flavor content of the data, independent of detector effects. If such fits are published by the experimental collaborations, along with plots comparing their predictions to distributions in data, they can be used as targets for describing the data within any full theoretical model.