The ATLAS forward physics program

The ATLAS forward detector system is presented. Luminosity determination using the LUCID and ALFA detectors is discussed in addition to diffractive measurements that should be possible with early data. A possible high luminosity upgrade strategy involving new forward proton detectors is also briefly reviewed

Forward Physics at ATLAS

Presentation on behalf of ATLAS at Low-x 200

Status of Forward Proton Tagging at ATLAS

Status of ATLAS forward proton tagging. To be presented in January at the DIFF2010 Conference

Proceedings of the workshop "Standard Model at the LHC" University College London 30 March - 1 April 2009

Proceedings from a 3-day discussion on Standard Model discoveries with the first LHC dataComment: 9 contributions to the proceedings of the LHC Standard Model worksho

Trapped and marginally trapped surfaces in Weyl-distorted Schwarzschild solutions

To better understand the allowed range of black hole geometries, we study Weyl-distorted Schwarzschild solutions. They always contain trapped surfaces, a singularity and an isolated horizon and so should be understood to be (geometric) black holes. However we show that for large distortions the isolated horizon is neither a future outer trapping horizon (FOTH) nor even a marginally trapped surface: slices of the horizon cannot be infinitesimally deformed into (outer) trapped surfaces. We consider the implications of this result for popular quasilocal definitions of black holes.Comment: The results are unchanged but this version supersedes that published in CQG. The major change is a rewriting of Section 3.1 to improve clarity and correct an error in the general expression for V(r,\theta). Several minor errors are also fixed - most significantly an incorrect statement made in the introduction about the extent of the outer prison in Vaidya. 17 pages, 2 figure

Reinstating the 'no-lose' theorem for NMSSM Higgs discovery at the LHC

The simplest supersymmetric model that solves the mu problem and in which the GUT-scale parameters need not be finely tuned in order to predict the correct value of the Z boson mass at low scales is the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM). However, in order that fine tuning be absent, the lightest CP-even Higgs boson h should have mass ~100 GeV and SM couplings to gauge bosons and fermions. The only way that this can be consistent with LEP limits is if h decays primarily via h->aa->4 tau or 4j but not 4b, where a is the lighter of the two pseudo-scalar Higgses that are present in the NMSSM. Interestingly, m_a 2 m_tau somewhat preferred. Thus, h -> 4 tau becomes a key mode of interest. Meanwhile, all other Higgs bosons of the NMSSM are typically quite heavy. Detection of any of the NMSSM Higgs bosons at the LHC in this preferred scenario will be very challenging using conventional channels. In this paper, we demonstrate that the h -> aa -> 4 tau decay chain should be visible if the Higgs is produced in the process pp -> p+h+p with the final state protons being measured using suitably installed forward detectors. Moreover, we show that the mass of both the h and the a can be determined on an event-by-event basis.Comment: 23 page

Discovery of an X-ray Jet and Extended Jet Structure in the Quasar PKS 1055+201

This letter reports rich X-ray jet structures found in the Chandra observation of PKS 1055+201. In addition to an X-ray jet coincident with the radio jet we detect a region of extended X-ray emission surrounding the jet as far from the core as the radio hotspot to the North, and a similar extended X-ray region along the presumed path of the unseen counterjet to the Southern radio lobe. Both X-ray regions show a similar curvature to the west, relative to the quasar. We interpret this as the first example where we separately detect the X-ray emission from a narrow jet and extended, residual jet plasma over the entire length of a powerful FRII jet.Comment: Accepted for publication in Ap. J. Letters. 4 pages, 3 figure

Central exclusive production of longlived gluinos at the LHC

We examine the possibility of producing gluino pairs at the LHC via the exclusive reaction pp -> p+gluino+gluino+p in the case where the gluinos are long lived. Such long lived gluinos are possible if the scalar super-partners have large enough masses. We show that it may be possible to observe the gluinos via their conversion to R-hadron jets and measure their mass to better than 1% accuracy for masses below 350 GeV with 300/fb of data.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures. Minor corrections to version