If signals of new physics are discovered at the LHC it will be crucial to determine the spin structure of the new model. We discuss a method that can help to address this question with a low integrated luminosity, L=1 fb^-1, at sqrt{s}=14 TeV. Based on the differences in angular distributions of primarily produced particles we show that a significant difference can be observed in the final state jet-pairs rapidity distance. An additional advantage of the method is that it does not rely on any particular structure of the couplings in the decay chain. We simulate samples for models with supersymmetric and UED-like spin structure and show that a distinction can be made early on.
I briefly overview the methods employed at the LHC to extract the top-quark mass, taking particular care about the theory uncertainty and the dependence on the Monte Carlo hadronization parameters.
Assuming the Higgs triplet model, we obtain the bounds on the absolute neutrino mass and the unknown MNS parameters by measuring decay processes of doubly charged particles at the CERN LHC. Majorana CP violating phases affect the prediction rather seriously, which is served to restrict these phases.
We present a new method to measure a theoretically well-defined mass of the top quark at the LHC. This method uses lepton energy distribution and has a boost-invariant nature. We perform a simulation analysis of the top mass reconstruction with this method for tt -> lepton+jets channel at the leading order. We estimate several major uncertainties in the top mass determination and find that they are under good control.
We study the determination of supersymmetric parameters at the LHC from a global fit including cross sections and edges of kinematic distributions. For illustration, we focus on a minimal supergravity scenario and discuss how well it can be constrained at the LHC operating at 7 and 14 TeV collision energy, respectively. We find that the inclusion of cross sections greatly improves the accuracy of the SUSY parameter determination, and allows to reliably extract model parameters even in the initial phase of LHC data taking with 7 TeV collision energy and 1/fb integrated luminosity. Moreover, cro…
The strategies recently developed to study Higgs boson properties at the LHC are reviewed. It is shown how to obtain model-independent determinations of couplings to fermions and gauge bosons by exploiting different production and decay channels. We consider in some detail the case of Weak Boson Fusion Higgs production with H --> b \bar b as well as the prospects for the determination of the Higgs self-coupling at the SLHC.
The prospects for the determination of the properties of a hypothetical boson discovered at the Large Hadron Collider using measurements to be performed with the ATLAS and CMS detectors are summarized. The properties that are discussed are the mass of the boson, its width, the strength of its couplings to fermions, the strength and structure of its couplings to gauge bosons and its spin and CP quantum numbers.
We demonstrate how the interplay of a future e^+e^- LC at its first stage with sqrt{s} sim 500 GeV and of the LHC could lead to a precise determination of the fundamental SUSY parameters in the gaugino/higgsino sector without assuming a specific supersymmetry breaking scheme. We demonstrate this for the benchmark scenario SPS1a, taking into account realistic errors for the masses and cross sections measured at the LC with polarised beams, including errors coming from polarisation measurements, and mass measurements at the LHC. The results clearly demonstrate the complementarity of the LHC and …
The possibility of detecting a Higgs boson through several production and decay channels is instrumental to the measurement of its couplings. In this paper we study the pp-> ttH(H-> tau tau) channel at the LHC, for the case of a scalar Higgs boson, and use the obtained results to improve on existing strategies toward a model independent determination of the Higgs boson couplings. The case of a scalar Higgs boson with mass below 140 GeV looks particularly promising.
We review the study of the charged Higgs and top quark associated production at the LHC with the presence of an additional scalar doublet. Top quark spin effects are related to the Higgs fermion couplings through this process. The angular distributions with respect to top quark spin turn out to be distinctive observables to study the $Htb$ interaction in different models.
We provide a discussion of the impact of a subset of Drell-Yan data from LHC on the determination of the photon parton distribution function (PDF), using the NNPDF methodology. In previous work we have shown that the photon PDF determined from deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) data only has large uncertainties, suggesting the need for more data from other processes such as Drell-Yan, which unlike DIS, includes photon-induced contributions at leading order in QED. We describe the inclusion of ATLAS Drell-Yan W, Z data, which is a subset of the LHC data used in a final photon PDF determination, by…
We investigate the determination of Higgs boson couplings to gauge bosons and fermions at the LHC from data on Higgs boson production and decay. We demonstrate that very mild theoretical assumptions, which are valid in general multi-Higgs doublet models, are sufficient to allow the extraction of absolute values of the couplings rather than just ratios of the couplings. For Higgs masses below 200 GeV we find accuracies of 10-40% for the Higgs couplings and the total Higgs boson width after several years of LHC running. The sensitivity of the Higgs coupling measurements to deviations from the St…
A new method to measure the mass of the top quark at the LHC is presented. This method uses lepton energy distribution and ideally does not depend on the velocity distribution of the top quark. We perform a simulation analysis of the top quark mass reconstruction using this method at the leading order, taking account of experimental circumstances. We estimate the sensitivity of the mass determination. The results show that this method is viable in realistic experimental conditions and has a possibility to achieve a good accuracy in determining a theoretically well-defined top quark mass by inc…
The precision measurement of the W boson mass allows to perform stringent consistency tests of the Standard Model by means of global electroweak fits. The accurate determination of the W boson mass is one of the legacy results of the Tevatron, where the experimental accuracy is such that $M_W$ is now limited by theoretical uncertainties related to the parton distributions of the proton. In this contribution, we show how to quantify the impact of PDF uncertainties in the measurement of $M_W$ at the Tevatron and the LHC by means of a template method, and study both the use of the W transverse ma…
Long-lived stau shows up in various supersymmetric models, like gauge-mediated supersymmetry (SUSY) breaking model. At the LHC experiment, long-lived stau is useful not only for the discovery of SUSY signals but also for the study of the detailed properties of superparticles. We discuss a method to obtain information on spins and chiralities of superparticles in the framework with long-lived stau. We also show that such a study can be used to distinguish SUSY model from other models of new physics, like the universal extra dimension model.
Current measurements of the top quark mass which have achieved a precision of less than 1 GeV involve a theoretical problem that the definition of the measured mass is ambiguous in perturbation theory. As a possible solution to the problem, we present a new method to measure the top quark mass at the LHC. This method uses lepton energy distribution and has a boost-invariant nature. We discuss strategies towards a precise determination of theoretically well-defined top quark masses such as the MSbar mass with the method. As a first step in this direction, a simulation analysis at the leading or…
We study the impact of the recently computed mixed QCD-electroweak corrections to the production of $W$ and $Z$ bosons at the LHC on the value of the $W$ mass extracted from the transverse momentum distribution of charged leptons from $W$ decays. Using the average lepton transverse momenta in $W$ and $Z$ decays as simplified observables for the determination of the $W$ mass, we estimate that mixed QCD-electroweak corrections can shift the extracted value of the $W$ mass by up to ${\cal O}(20)~{\rm MeV}$, depending on the kinematic cuts employed to define fiducial cross sections for $Z$ and $W$…
We show how a measurement of the process pp-->t tbar H + X at the LHC and a measurement of the Higgs boson branching ratios BR(H-->b bar) and BR(H-->W+W-) at a future linear electron positron collider can be combined to extract a model-independent measurement of the top quark Yukawa coupling. We find that for 120 GeV < m_H < 200 GeV a measurement precision of 15% including systematic uncertainties can be achieved for integrated luminosities of 300 fb-1 at the LHC and 500 fb-1 at the LC at a centre-of-mass energy of 350 GeV.
The impact of the LHC, SLHC and the ILC on the precision of the determination of supersymmetric parameters is investigated. In particular, in the point SPS1a the measurements performed at the ILC will improve by an order of magnitude the precision obtained by the LHC alone. The SLHC with respect to the LHC has the potential to reduce the errors by a factor two.
We study the determination of the top-quark mass using leptonic observables in t-channel single top-quark production at the LHC. We demonstrate sensitivity of transverse momentum of the charged lepton on the input top-quark mass. We present predictions at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD with narrow width approximation and structure function approach. Further corrections due to parton shower and hadronization, non-resonant and non-factorized contributions are discussed. To reduce impact of SM backgrounds we propose to use the charge weighted distribution for the measurement, i.e., d…
When several sparticle masses are known, the kinematics of SUSY decay processes observed at the LHC can be solved if the cascade decays contain sufficient steps. We demonstrate four examples of this full reconstruction technique applied to channels involving leptons, namely a) gluino mass determination, b) sbottom mass determination, c) LSP momentum reconstruction, and d) heavy higgs mass determination.
Two important properties of a Higgs boson are its mass and width. They may distinguish the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson from Higgs bosons of extended models. We show results from a direct mass and width reconstruction for a Higgs boson mass range from 120 to 340 GeV. The mass and width have been reconstructed from the H --> ZZstar --> mu+mu-mu+mu- reaction in an LHC simulation of the CMS detector. The determined mass accuracy has been compared with that obtained from studies for a linear collider (LC). The mass precision from the latter studies is derived by scaling previous LC simulation r…
A substantial off-shell Higgs boson signal in the gluon fusion and vector boson fusion H --> ZZ and H --> WW channels at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) facilitates a novel, complementary approach to constraining the total Higgs width Gamma_H. With LHC Run 1 data, experimental analyses by CMS and ATLAS find Gamma_H < 5.4 Gamma_H,SM and Gamma_H < [4.5,7.5] Gamma_H,SM at 95% confidence level, respectively, where Gamma_H,SM is the expected value in the Standard Model at the measured Higgs boson mass. I review the theoretical basis of the new approach and discuss its significance in comparison to …
The weak boson fusion process for neutral Higgs boson production is investigated with particular attention to the accuracy with which the Higgs boson couplings to weak bosons can be determined in final states that contain a Higgs boson plus at least two jets at CERN Large Hadron Collider energies. We determine that an accuracy of δg/g ~ 10% on the effective coupling g may be possible after the accumulation of ~ 200 inverse fb of integrated luminosity.
An attempt is made to summarize the discussion at the Workshop, except for the panel discussion on the ability of the LHC detectors to accommodate forward reactions. The Workshop focused on two main topics. The first topic was forward physics at the LHC. Predictions were made for forward reactions, including elastic scattering and soft diffractive processes, intopic was forward physics at the LHC. Predictions were made for forward reactions, including elastic scattering and soft diffractive processes, in terms of (multi) Pomeron exchange, using knowledge gained at lower energies. The survival …
The LHC era just began. The first discovery at the LHC experiment would be arguably a new resonance pole at TeV scale, if it exists. While the discovery of the Z' would be exciting by itself, it may also suggest what other new physics signals should be looked for while the LHC experiment is still at its early stage. We argue that the four lepton resonance at the Z' pole is a well-motivated and promising signal especially in supersymmetry framework, which can serve as a supersymmetry search scheme even in the early stage of the LHC experiment.
We show that the early LHC measurements can provide crucial checks of the different components of the formalism used to predict the cross sections of central exclusive processes.
A long standing problem in kinematics at the hadron colliders is to determine the mass of invisible particles. This issue is particularly important for the signals of dark matter, which becomes one of the prominent targets of future collider experiments. In this paper, we show that the additional information from the precise timing measurement, which will be available at the planned high-liminosity run of the LHC (HL-LHC), will shade new light on the kinematics study. As a concrete example, we focus on the signal of the pair produced long-lived particles ($LLP_{1,2}$), respectively leaving dis…
We study the phenomenology of the heavy charged gauge boson and obtain the lower bounds on its mass with the early LHC data at 7 TeV center-of-mass energy in the nonuniversal gauge interaction model, in which the electroweak SU(2) gauge group depends upon the fermion family. We found that the direct bound on the mass of the $W'$ boson is compatible to the indirect bound with only the early data of the LHC.
Absolute normalisation of the LHC measurements with O(1%) precision and their relative normalisation, for the data collected at variable centre-of-mass energies, or for variable beam particle species, with O(0.1%) precision is crucial for the LHC experimental programme but presently beyond the reach for the general purpose LHC detectors. This paper is the third in the series of papers presenting the measurement method capable to achieve such a goal.
In the analysis of experimental data on $p p$ (or $\bar p p$) elastic differential cross section it is customary to define an average forward slope $b$ in the form $\exp{(-b|t|)}$, where $t$ is the momentum transfer. Taking as working example the results of experiments at Tevatron and SPS, we will show with the help of the impact picture approach, that this simplifying assumption hides interesting information on the complex non-flip scattering amplitude, and that the slope $b$ is not a constant. We investigate the variation of this slope parameter, including a model-independent way to extract …
Most of the methods to measure the top quark mass suffer from the jet energy scaling in achieving better precision. As a way to circumvent this issue, the study of $B$-hadron observables is motivated. While they do not involve such an issue, understanding underlying hadronization models is a key to achieve $\sim 0.5\%$ precision or better. In this presentation, we discuss the impact of the hadronization model parameters - for example, implemented in Pythia 8 - on precision measurements of the top quark mass through $B$-hadron observables. We study the sensitivity of the top quark mass to relev…
Spin measurements are crucial in distinguishing major scenarios of TeV scale new physics once it is discovered at the LHC. We give a brief survey of methods of measuring the spin of new physics particles at the LHC. We focus on the case in which a long lived massive neutral particle is produced at the end of every cascade decay and escape detection. This is the case for R-parity preserving supersymmetry, Little Higgs models with T-parity, extra-dimensional models with KK-parity, and a large class of similar models and scenarios. After briefly commenting on measuring spin by combining mass and …
The LHC has recently released precise measurements of the transverse momentum distribution of the Z-boson that provide a unique constraint on the structure of the proton. Theoretical developments now allow the prediction of these observables through next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in perturbative QCD. In this work we study the impact of incorporating these latest advances into a determination of parton distribution functions (PDFs) through NNLO including the recent ATLAS and CMS 7 TeV and 8 TeV $p_T^Z$ data. We investigate the consistency of these measurements in a global fit to the avail…
We discuss the expected sensitivity to Z' boson effects in the W^\pm boson pair production process at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The results of a model-dependent analysis of Z' boson effects are presented as constraints on the Z-Z' mixing angle phi and Z' boson mass. The process pp\to W^+W^- + X allows to place stringent constraints on the Z-Z' mixing angle. Specifically, we find that the present LHC bounds on the mixing angle are of the order a few times 10^{-3}, what is of the same order as those derived from the electroweak data. These results were derived from analysis of W-pair prod…
We explore the opportunity to look for large extra dimensions in the early stages of the LHC running. The high-E$_T$ dijet production is analyzed via a novel kinematic variable when the machine center-of-mass energy varies from 7 TeV through 10 TeV to 14 TeV and the accumulated data range from 0.5 to 8 fb$^{-1}$. The estimations of the reach in the effective scale $M_S$ for different numbers of large extra dimensions are presented.
The analysis of the procedure of the determining the parameters of the hadron elastic scattering amplitude at high energy is presented. The exponential and non-exponential form of the scattering amplitude are taken into account. Especially, the impact of the real parts of the hadron scattering amplitude and electromagnetic hadron interaction on the determination of the total cross section is examined.
The LHC has already provided many relevant measurements for the determination of parton distribution functions (PDFs). Measurements of the W and Z lepton distributions are of interest for flavor separation and in particular for the determination of the relatively poorly constrained strange quark distribution. In this contribution we shall discuss the computational developments that allow for the efficient inclusion of LHC data into the NNPDF framework consistently at NLO for all observables, and we study the constraints of the LHC W and Z data on the strangeness content of the proton.
We study the impact of the inclusion of Neutral Current (NC) DY data from LHC mapped in the Forward-Backward Asymmetry ($A_{\rm FB}$) observable on PDF uncertainties, using the open source platform \texttt{xFitter}. We find that $A_{\rm FB}$ enables new PDF sensitivity at current and future luminosity stages of LHC.
The LHC has the potential not only to discover supersymmetry (SUSY), but also to permit fairly precise measurements of at least a portion of the sparticle spectrum. Proposed mass reconstruction methods rely upon either inverting invariant mass endpoint expressions or upon solving systems of mass-shell equations. These methodologies suffer from the weakness that one certain specific sparticle decay chain is assumed to account for all the events in the sample. Taking two examples of techniques utilizing mass-shell equations, it is found that also applying the wedgebox technique allows for the is…
The transverse momentum distributions measured in $p-p$ collisions at the LHC determine the kinetic freeze-out stage of the collision. The parameters deduced from these distributions differ from those determined at chemical freeze-out. The present investigation focuses on the chemical potentials at kinetic freeze-out, these are not necessarily zero as they are at chemical freeze-out, the only constraint is that they should be equal for particles and antiparticles at LHC energies. The thermodynamic variables are determined in the framework of the Tsallis distribution. The chemical potentials in…
With the start-up of the LHC, we can hope to find evidences for new physics beyond the Standard Model, and particle candidates for dark matter. Determining the parameters of the full underlying theory will be a long process requiring the combination of LHC and ILC data, flavor physics constraints, and cosmological observations. However, the Very Early Universe properties, from which the relic particles originate, are poorly known, and the relic density calculation can be easily falsified by hidden processes. We consider supersymmetry and show that determining the underlying particle physics pa…
We examine the ability of LHC experiments to observe jets from squark pair production at the center-of-mass energy E$_{CM}$=10 TeV and 1 fb$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity. We point out the crucial influence of initial- and final-state radiation on the signal/background discriminating ability of different kinematic variables. The reliable measurements of missing transverse energy and stransverse mass would play a key role in picking out the signal against the background.
Many techniques exist to reconstruct New Physics masses from LHC data, though these tend to either require high luminosity O(100) fb^-1, or an accurate measurement of missing transverse energy (MET) which may not be available in the early running of the LHC. Since in popular models such as SUSY a fairly sharp, triangular dilepton invariant mass spectrum can emerge already at low luminosity O(1) fb^-1, a Decay Kinematics (DK) technique can be used on events near the dilepton mass endpoint to estimate squark, slepton, and neutralino masses without relying on MET. With the first 2 fb^-1 of 7 TeV …
Resonance searches generally focus on narrow states that would produce a sharp peak rising over background. Early LHC running will, however, be sensitive primarily to broad resonances. In this paper we demonstrate that statistical methods should suffice to find broad resonances and distinguish them from both background and contact interactions over a large range of previously unexplored parameter space. We furthermore introduce an angular measure we call ellipticity, which measures how forward (or backward) the muon is in eta, and allows for discrimination between models with different parity …
We investigate what new physics signatures the LHC can discover in the 2009-2010 run, beyond the expected sensitivity of the Tevatron data by 2010. We construct "supermodels", for which the LHC sensitivity even with only 10 inverse picobarn is greater than that of the Tevatron with 10 inverse femtobarn. The simplest supermodels involve s-channel resonances in the quark-antiquark and especially in the quark-quark channels. We concentrate on easily visible final states with small standard model backgrounds, and find that there are simple searches, besides those for Z' states, which could discove…
We discuss the possibility to observe new resonances at the early LHC using a phenomenological approach. We show predictions for the production of a scalar in the gg-channel and an heavy quark in the qg-channel and we compare them with the recent results of the ATLAS and CMS experiments in the di-jet channel, setting upper limits on the relevant couplings. We finally discuss the importance of the final states containing at least one photon making sensitivity predictions for the corresponding couplings.
In this paper, we calculate the $t\bar{t}$ pQCD production cross-section at NNLO and determine the top-quark pole mass from recent measurements at the LHC at $\sqrt{S}=13$ TeV center-of-mass energy to high precision by applying the Principle of Maximum Conformality (PMC). The PMC provides a systematic method which rigorously eliminates QCD renormalization scale ambiguities by summing the nonconformal $β$ contributions into the QCD coupling constant. The PMC predictions satisfy the requirements of renormalization group invariance, including renormalization scheme independence, and the PMC scale…
In case of the discovery of supersymmetry at the LHC, the goal will be to identify the underlying theory, its fundamental parameters, and the masses of SUSY particles. We followed here the approach to reconstruct the decay chains in SUSY events under the assumption of common intermediate masses. These masses cannot be extracted from each event because of the unmeasured LSP momenta in case of R-parity conservation. But an ensemble of events can be over-constrained, if the decay chains are long enough, such that enough mass constraints are available. Here, we present a new method combining a) a …
We investigate new physics that could be discovered with very little LHC data, beyond the expected sensitivity of the Tevatron. We construct "supermodels", for which the LHC sensitivity with 10 pb-1 luminosity is already greater than that of the Tevatron with 10 fb-1. The simplest supermodels involve s-channel resonances in the quark-antiquark and especially in the quark-quark channels. In the latter case, the LHC sensitivity with 0.1 pb-1 can already be greater than that of the Tevatron with 10 fb-1. We concentrate on easily visible final states with small standard model backgrounds, and find…
We have examined the dijet production at the LHC as a hint to discovery of string Regge excitations of Standard Model particles. If the fundamental string mass scale is in the TeV range, the influence of string effects on the $pp$ interaction can arise as new resonances in the dijet invariant mass distribution. Near the first resonant pole we investigate the impact of the subprocesses with quark-gluon and four-gluon separately. We show that the LHC is able to probe the string mass scale $\sim$5 TeV with only 2 pb$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity at $E_{CM}=14$ TeV.
Recent LHC W/Z vector boson production data in proton-lead collisions are quite sensitive to the heavier flavors (especially the strange PDF), and this complements the information from neutrino-DIS data. As the proton flavor determination is dependent on nuclear corrections (from heavy target DIS, for example), LHC heavy ion measurements can also help improve proton PDFs. We introduce a new implementation of the nCTEQ code (nCTEQ++) based on C++ which has a modular strucure and enables us to easily integrate programs such as HOPPET, APPLgrid, and MCFM. Using ApplGrids generated from MCFM, we u…
Recently a new set of Parton Distribution Functions (NNPDF1.2) has been produced and released by the NNPDF Collaboration. The inclusion of dimuon data in the analysis allows a determination of the strange content of the proton with faithful uncertainty estimation together with a precision determination of electroweak parameters. In this contribution, we discuss some of the implications of the NNPDF1.2 set, and in particular of its uncertainty determination of the strange PDFs, for LHC phenomenology. First of all, we study the impact on the electroweak boson production cross-section, with speci…
We present the first determination of parton distributions of the nucleon at NLO and NNLO based on a global data set which includes LHC data: NNPDF2.3. Our data set includes, besides the deep inelastic, Drell-Yan, gauge boson production and jet data already used in previous global PDF determinations, all the relevant LHC data for which experimental systematic uncertainties are currently available: ATLAS and LHCb W and Z lepton rapidity distributions from the 2010 run, CMS W electron asymmetry data from the 2011 run, and ATLAS inclusive jet cross-sections from the 2010 run. We introduce an impr…
We explore the opportunity to look for quark compositeness in the early stages of the LHC running by analyzing high-$E_T$ dijet production. The quark substructure that will manifest itself by affecting various kinematic distributions at the center-of-mass energy $E_{CM}$=10 TeV and in the integrated luminosity range from 0.5 to 10 fb$^{-1}$ is investigated. The estimation of the characteristic energy scale $Λ$, based on the novel, potentially powerful observable, is found to be sensitive to the sign of the interference between Standard Model and four-fermion contact interactions. We find the l…
The leptonic decays of the heavy gauge bosons W and/or Z provide a clear experimental signature at hadron colliders. The production of accompanying jets is an excellent signal to probe QCD, while also being the main background to many searches for new physics. Describing the complex final state of W or Z + jets is a theoretical challenge with most existing calculations combining matrix elements for high energy jet production with a parton shower for lower energy jet production. We focus on two models: SHERPA, which uses Leading Order matrix elements for boson and jet production; and POWHEG wit…
We perform a study of the LHC discovery reach on a heavy gluon (G*) and heavy fermions (top and bottom excitations), coming from a new composite sector. We find that heavy fermion resonances have a great impact on the composite gluon phenomenology. If the composite gluon is heavier than composite fermions, as flavor observables seem to suggest, the search in the channel where G* decays into a heavy fermion plus its Standard Model partner is very promising, with the possibility for both the G* and heavy fermions to be discovered at the early stage of the LHC. The channel offers also the possibi…
We present a comparative study of the invariant mass and rapidity distributions in Drell-Yan lepton pair production, with particular emphasis on the role played by the QCD evolution. We focus our study around the Z resonance ($50 <Q < 200$ GeV) and perform a general analysis of the factorization/renormalization scale dependence of the cross sections, with the two scales included both in the evolution and in the hard scatterings. We also present the variations of the cross sections due to the errors on the parton distributions (pdf's) and an analysis of the corresponding $K$-factors. Prediction…
