Heavy Particles at the LHC

DPG Physics School on

Heavy Particles at the LHC

supported by the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus - Foundation
and by the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology, Durham
16 - 21 September, 2012, Physikzentrum Bad Honnef, Germany
Organized by
Tilman Plehn (Heidelberg University) and Thomas Schörner-Sadenius (DESY)

Poster

In its running until the end of 2011, the LHC has delivered about 5 fb-1 to both the ATLAS and CMS experiments. The performance of accelerator and experiments - in terms of detector understanding and precision - were beyond expectations, and as a consequence a multitude of physics results has already been published.

Most of these results concentrate on Standard Model physics, like for example the observation of well-known fermions and bosons and precise measurements of their properties and interactions. Tests of perturbative QCD have shown an impressive agreement between theory and experiment. In addition, limits have been derived on the production cross sections and masses of many new particles predicted by various extensions of the Standard Model like supersymmetry, extra dimensions, models with extra gauge bosons, etc.

Special attention has been given to the Higgs boson of the Standard Model. Currently (February 2012) the ATLAS and CMS collaborations are preparing publications using the full available statistics, hinting at a possible signal at a mass of around 125 GeV. The year 2012, with an additional luminosity of perhaps 10 fb-1 per experiment, will provide the necessary statistics to finally answer the question of a Standard Model Higgs boson. The accumulated data sets might also reveal first insights into the structure of physics beyond the Standard Model.

The School will prepare its participants for the upcoming discoveries by discussing the production and properties of heavy and heaviest particles known (from the Standard Model) or expected at the LHC (based on extensions of the Standard Model): W and Z bosons, top quarks, Higgs bosons, supersymmetric particles, new heavy resonances, heavy gauge bosons etc. Lectures will cover the various particles including the theoretical framework, current constraints, QCD aspects relevant for the LHC, experimental detection, and analysis techniques necessary for their discovery and reconstruction. The program will be complemented by two evening lectures on dark matter particles and on the history of the top quark.

The school aims at advanced master students, PhD students and young postdocs from LHC experiment and theory, and from related fields. Knowledge of the basics of hadron collider physics is required.

Invited Speakers:

Lucia Di Ciaccio (Universite de Savoie, LAPP): QCD and electoweak physics
Yvonne Peters (Göttingen, DESY): Top physics 1, 2, 3
Adrian Signer (PSI): Top theory 1, 2
Vivek Sharma (UCSD): Higgs physics
Tao Han (Pittsburgh): Higgs theory
Graham Kribs (Eugene, Oregon): Supersymmetry 1, 2, Extra dimensions, Tim's talk
Aafke Kraan (INFN Pisa): Massive stable particles
Albert de Roeck (CERN etc): Exotica
Jörg Jäckel (Heidelberg): Light particles not at the LHC
Dan Hooper (Fermilab, Chicago): Dark matter (evening talk)
Tom Ferbel (Rochester): The top quark and other tales of `discovery' (evening talk)