Local Impurity Phase Pinning and Pinning Force in Charge Density Waves

Starting from the static Fukuyama-Lee-Rice equation for a three-dimensional incommensurate charge density wave (CDW) in quasi one-dimensional conductors a solvable model for local phase pinning by impurities is defined and studied. We find that average CDW energy and average pinning force show critical behaviour with respect to the pinning parameter $h$. Specifically the pinning force exhibits a threshold at $h=1$ with exponent $\beta=2$. Our model examplifies a general concept of local impurity pinning in which the force exerted by the impurity on the periodic CDW structure becomes multivalued and metastable states appear beyond a threshold. It is found that local impurity pinning becomes less effective at low temperatures and may eventually cease completely. These results are independent of spatial dimensionality as expected for local impurity pinning. Comparison with Larkin's model is also made.Comment: Latex, 16 pages, 3 figure

Event Generator for Particle Production in High-Energy Collisions

Event generators are an indispensable tool for the preparation and analysis of particle-physics experiments. In this contribution, physics principles underlying the construction of such computer programs are discussed. Results, within and beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, obtained with a new event generator are presented. This generator is capable to describe signal processes for exotic physics and their backgrounds at electron-positron and proton-(anti)proton colliders.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures. Talk given by G. Soff at the 25th Course of the International School on Nuclear Physic

Multi-jet cross sections at NLO with BlackHat and Sherpa

In this talk, we report on a recent next-to-leading order QCD calculation of the production of a W boson in association with three jets at hadron colliders. The computation is performed by combining two programs, BlackHat for the computation of the virtual one-loop matrix elements and Sherpa for the real emission part.Comment: 4 pages, contribution to the proceedings of the XLIIIth Rencontres de Moriond (QCD

Searching for Multijet Resonances at the LHC

Recently it was shown that there is a class of models in which colored vector and scalar resonances can be copiously produced at the Tevatron with decays to multijet final states, consistent with all experimental constraints and having strong discovery potential. We investigate the collider phenomenology of TeV scale colored resonances at the LHC and demonstrate a strong discovery potential for the scalars with early data as well as the vectors with additional statistics. We argue that the signal can be self-calibrating and using this fact we propose a search strategy which we show to be robust to systematic errors typically expected from Monte Carlo background estimates. We model the resonances with a phenomenological Lagrangian that describes them as bound states of colored vectorlike fermions due to new confining gauge interactions. However, the phenomenological Lagrangian treatment is quite general and can represent other scenarios of microscopic physics as well.Comment: 28 pages, 13 figures, pdflatex. Discussion of background expanded, minor modifications made. Version to appear in JHE

Event generation with SHERPA 1.1

In this paper the current release of the Monte Carlo event generator Sherpa, version 1.1, is presented. Sherpa is a general-purpose tool for the simulation of particle collisions at high-energy colliders. It contains a very flexible tree-level matrix-element generator for the calculation of hard scattering processes within the Standard Model and various new physics models. The emission of additional QCD partons off the initial and final states is described through a parton-shower model. To consistently combine multi-parton matrix elements with the QCD parton cascades the approach of Catani, Krauss, Kuhn and Webber is employed. A simple model of multiple interactions is used to account for underlying events in hadron--hadron collisions. The fragmentation of partons into primary hadrons is described using a phenomenological cluster-hadronisation model. A comprehensive library for simulating tau-lepton and hadron decays is provided. Where available form-factor models and matrix elements are used, allowing for the inclusion of spin correlations; effects of virtual and real QED corrections are included using the approach of Yennie, Frautschi and Suura.Comment: 47 pages, 21 figure