LHC Phenomenology

Abstract

While the first two parts of these lecture notes focus on Higgs physics and on QCD, biased towards aspects relevant to the LHC, they hardly justify the title of the lecture notes. In addition, both introductions really are theoretical physics. The third section will introduce other aspects which theorists working on LHC topics need to know. It goes beyond what you find in theoretical physics text books and is usually referred to as ‘phenomenology’. ¹

Further Reading

Again, there exist several good review articles with more in-depth discussions of different aspects touched in this section:

• As mentioned in Sect. 2, two very useful reviews of jet physics are available by Steve Ellis and collaborators [8] and by Gavin Salam [18].

• If you are interested in top identification using fat jet techniques we wrote a short pedagogical review article illustrating the different techniques and tools available [16].

• For the general phenomenology of the heaviest Standard Model particles, the top quark, have a look at Sally Dawson’s TASI lectures [7].

• If you use Madgraph/HELAS to compute helicity amplitudes there is the original documentation which describes every routine [15].

• A lot of experimental knowledge on new physics searches well described and theoretically sound you can find in the CMS technical design report. Some key analyses are described in detail while most of the documentation focuses on the physics expectations [4].

• More on the magical variable m _T2 you can find in an article by Alan Barr, Chris Lester and Phil Stephens [2]. Chris Lester’s thesis [13] is a good point to start with. Recently, Alan Barr and Chris Lester published a broad review on techniques to measure masses in models with dark matter particles [3].

• As mentioned in the introduction, there is our more advanced review on new physics at the LHC which includes an extensive chapter on LHC signatures [14].

• A lot of insight into new physics searches at the LHC and at a linear collider you can find in a huge review article collected by Georg Weiglein [22].

• The pivotal work on determining spins in cascade decays is Jennie Smillie’s PhD thesis [19]. On the same topic there exists a nicely written review by Liantao Wang and Itay Yavin [20].

• Many useful pieces of information on mass extraction, errors, and the statistical treatment of new-physics parameter spaces you can find in the big SFitter publication [11]. The SFitter analysis of the Higgs sector [12] is very similar in structure, but different in the physics application.

• If you are interested in a recent discussion of experimental and theoretical errors and how to factorize them, you can try a recent paper we wrote with Kyle Cranmer, Sven Kreiss, and David Lopez–Val [6].