Giacomo Bruno, Jérôme de Favereau, Christophe Delaere, Pavel Demin, Andrea Giammanco, Vincent Lemaitre, Fabio Maltoni, Olivier Mattelaer

The discovery of the 125GeV Higgs boson by the LHC experiments has finally opened a new era in the exploration of the TeV scale. The physics programs of CMS and ATLAS aim far beyond the simple discovery, and vigorously pursue the full characterization of the newly discovered state and the full exploration of the TeV scale in search of new phenomena. A key lesson drawn from first two years of LHC running is that most probably first discoveries and then identification of new states/interactions will not be easy. On the one hand, model-independent searches in simple topologies such as single/multi lepton at high transverse momenta have not shown any hint of new physics so far. On the other, topologies with jets and/or missing transverse energies, much more challenging experimentally, do strongly depend on the underlying theoretical models so that efficiently identifying signal enhanced regions of the phase space is quite involved. In this context, multi-variate techniques have become more and more central in the analysis of data from hadron collider experiments, to maximally exploit the information available on the signal and on the backgrounds. Amongst the most advanced techniques and certainly the most powerful one from the theoretical point of view, the so called matrix element method stands out. The main goal of this proposal is to advance the use and the scope of the matrix-element method so to significantly extend the range of physics applications at the LHC to the search of new physics. First we aim at providing the experimental HEP community with complete and automatic simulation tools, such as MadWeight/MoMEMta and Delphes, that overcome the technical limitations of the method. Second we propose to test and apply the new tools to current analyses in signatures that involve final state leptons and b-jets. Finally, we explore new and original applications of the method to both model-dependent or model-independent searches of new physics at the LHC.

External collaborators: CMS collaboration.

Andrea Giammanco

A framework for Fast Simulation of particle interactions in the CMS detector (FastSim) has been developed and implemented in the overall simulation, reconstruction and analysis framework of CMS. It produces data samples in the same format as the one used by the Geant4-based (henceforth Full) Simulation and Reconstruction chain; the output of the Fast Simulation of CMS can therefore be used in the analysis in the same way as data and Full Simulation samples. FastSim is used in several physics analyses in CMS, in particular those requiring a generation of many samples to scan an extended parameter space of the physics model (e.g. SUSY) or for the purpose of estimating systematic uncertainties. It is also used by several groups to design future sub-detectors for the Phase-II CMS upgrades.
Related activities at UCL include the integration with the Full Simulation in the simulation of the electronic read-out ("digitization") and of the pileup of events from other proton-proton collisions, both in-time and out-of-time; the performance monitoring; and the overall maintenance and upgrade of the tracking-related code. Matthias Komm is current L3 convener of Tracking in FastSim, and Andrea Giammanco has been main responsible of the FastSim project from 2011 to 2013.

Christophe Delaere, Andrea Giammanco, Vincent Lemaitre

Search for Higgs boson(s) within the Standard Model and beyond and also withing a minimal extension of the scalar sector (2HDM).

The final state under study is a lepton pair associated with two b-jets and missing transverse energy. This topology is sensitive to a light SM Higgs via the H(bb)H(WW) production (via loop or Higgs self-coupling diagrams) and via the associated production of ttbar pairs and invisible particles. Requiring additional b jets (thus defining the llbbbb+MET final state) allows also the very interesting studies of a standard model Higgs produced in association with a top quark pair and It is also sensitive to the production of non standard heavy Higgs bosons decaying into ZA or WA, in the WAWA and ZAZA channels.

In particular, we are studying both resonant and non-resonant Higgs-pair production.

External collaborators: CMS collaboration.

Andrea Giammanco

During 2012, the CMS and ATLAS collaborations independently reported unambiguous evidence of the existence of a new particle of mass around 125 GeV.
Several analyses are ongoing to challenge the hypothesis that the new particle is the SM Higgs. We focus on the search for its production in association with a single top quark. Due to an effect of quantum interference, this process is strongly suppressed in the Standard Model while it gets enhanced if its couplings to the top quark and to the W boson have opposite sign. An observation of this production mode would therefore be a convincing proof that this new particle does not belong to the Standard Model.
We published the first search for this process using 8 TeV data, and we expect to achieve sensitivity to anomalous values of the top Yukawa phase during the LHC Run-II.

External collaborators: CMS collaboration.