​Taller Altas Energías 2008 - Madrid Particle Physics Phenomenology and the LHC

Authors

• Fabio Maltoni (lecturer)
• Claude Duhr (tutor)

Lectures

Find the pdf of the 3 x 1.5 hours lecture:

• Lecture 1​ : QCD at hadron colliders
• Lecture 2​ : SM of EW interactions : SU(2)xU(1), EWSB, the Higgs mechanism
• Lecture 3​ : Higgs, top and BSM phenomenology at the LHC

A brief tutorial on MadGraph / MadEvent can be found here​.

References

• Lecture 1 : ​QCD and Collider Physics by Keith Ellis, James Stirling, Bryan Webber (Cambridge Monographs, 1996).
• Lecture 2 : "Standard Model of electroweak interactions", by A. Pich, ​[hep-ph/0502010].
• Lecture 3 : Perspectives on LHC physics, Ed. by G. Kane and A. Pierce.

Answers to some of the questions asked during lecture can be found here.

Tests and Exercises

The following tests help to understand the lectures better, and to prepare for the exercises related to the different lectures:

• Test for lecture 1.
• Test for lecture 2.

A pdf with the exercises related to the lectures can be found here​.
Some of the exercises proposed can be "solved" or checked with MadGraph / MadEvent.

Introduction to hadron collisions

• Kinematics at the LHC: single particle quantities.
• Jets : Di-jet kinematics and rates in pp collisions.
• 3 Jets : Energy distributions in 3-jet events.
• Drell-Yan : Study the rapidity asymmetry at the Tevatron.

Higgs and top

• Higgs : Higgs phenomenology at hadron colliders.
• top production : $t \bar t$ production, Tevatron vs LHC.

New Physics

• t' production : $t'$ production at the LHC.
• New resonances: Discover new resonances at the LHC.

Animations

• ​Interactive Flash version Note you may want to zoom in!
• ​Fast movie (.avi) of collision
• ​Guided movie (.mov) of collision

Familiarize with MadGraph

• Logon to the MadGraph web site and register: ​http://madgraph.hep.uiuc.edu.

• Familiarize with the code by generating a few processes in QED + QCD trying to guess which diagrams appear.

• Look at the new physics models and check the particle and interactions content.

• Generate events for a few selected processes and look at the plots:
  • ttbar production with decays: pp>tt~>bb~mu+e-ve~vm
  • VV production: pp>VV> leptons, with V=Z,W.
  • Single top + Higgs: pp>tHj (QCD=0, QED=3, j=gudsc,p=gudscb). Show that there is a large negative interference between the diagrams.

Analysis Tools

• a Fortran-based package: MadAnalysis (​Download it here)
• a Mathematica-based package: ​Chameleon.

MC101

For those interested in Monte Carlo techniques, here are some exercises:

• Write the simplest integration function based on the definition of average and error
• Importance sampling via an analytic transformation
• Von Neumann's rejection method : plain and improved
• Phase space for 1 -> n particles
• Vegas
• Top decay : comparison among the various methods
• qq -> tt production

All exercises are presented and solved this Mathematica Notebook: mc101.nb​. Reference: ​Introduction to MC methods, by ​Stefan Weinzierl

-- Main.FabioMaltoni - 29 Aug 2008