Schedule Sep 15, 2017
Dijets, and Displaced Decays
Samuel Alipour-fard, Mentors Nathaniel Craig and Seth Koren (Physics)

In the past half century, the Standard Model of particle physics (SM) has been resoundingly successful in predicting our experimental observations of the microscopic universe. However, there are notable questions that lay unanswered by the SM. These questions lead us to expect physics beyond the SM (BSM); however, collider searches have thus far been unsuccessful in finding conclusive BSM results. While most of our experimental searches and phenomenological tools have been developed to deal with particles that decay immediately, there have been few experimental searches for ‘displaced’/long-lived decays, and few simulations/reinterpretations of these experimental results. To make the best use of the data coming out of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), we therefore develop tools and implement simulations of displaced decays. We test this technology on a simple BSM model in which a metastable particle can decay into a pair of collimated hadrons (a dijet), and put bounds on this model by comparing the signatures of dijets in our model to experimental data from the Compact Muon Solenoid detector in the LHC. This implementation and recasting of displaced decay searches allows us to develop the tools needed to approach the unexplored frontier of displaced decays and probe BSM physics to learn as much as possible about our universe from the LHC. In particular, an apparent and imminent use of this technology is the simulation and analysis of exotic decays of the Higgs Boson.


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