The CMS High Level Trigger and W' Searches at 7 TeV

Speaker: David Sperka

When: January 17, 2012 (Tue), 09:30AM to 10:30AM (add to my calendar)
Location: SCI 352

This event is part of the Preliminary Oral Exam.

Examining Committee: Tulika Bose, John Butler, Kenneth Lane, Anatoli Polkovnikov Abstract: In this talk I will discuss several topics related to the operation and physics results of the CMS experiment at the LHC during the first two years of proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV. I will focus on the performance of the High Level Trigger (HLT), in particular the muon HLT and the CPU performance of the HLT menu. I will then describe the search for a W' boson decaying to a muon and neutrino, which depends on the muon HLT. Many new physics models predict the existence of a W' particle to help resolve the hierarchy problem of the standard model and explain electroweak symmetry breaking. Finally I will describe a complementary W' search where the W' decays to a top and bottom quark.