| Seminar Date: | Tuesday, January 22, 2013 |
| Time: | 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM |
| Location: | Madrone |
| Abstract: | At the LHC, many new physics signatures feature pair-production of massive particles with subsequent direct or cascading decays to weakly-interacting particles, such as SUSY scenarios with conserved R-parity or H -> WW -> (lnu)(lnu), often motivated by models of new physics which attempt to mitigate the hierarchy problem in the Standard Model. We introduce a set of dimensionless kinematic variables that can assist in the early discovery of processes of this type in conjunction with a set of variables with mass dimension that will expedite the characterization of these processes, called the razor variables. We will discuss the derivation of these variables, working from examples motivated by the signal processes we are searching for. The phenomenology of the these variables will be described for both signal and background event topologies. Additionally, we will describe the design of analyses utilizing these variables, in particular focusing on the CMS SUSY searches in the all-hadronic, single lepton and di-lepton final states, applied to the 2010-11 datasets at 7 TeV. We will briefly discuss possibilities for new, exclusive searches for new physics for the LHC based on adaptations of these variables. |
| Speaker: | Chris Rogan - Caltech
 Mr. Rogan received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 2006, where he started working with the CMS experimental group. He has continued working on CMS ever since, continuing as a graduate student at Caltech, and expects to receive a Ph.D. this month. His research interests include precision calorimetry, measurements of the spin and quantum numbers of newly discovered particles, such as the Higgs-like boson recently found at CMS and ATLAS, and searches for SUSY and other BSM phenomenon.
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