Hyperplane arrangements and K-theory

We study the Z/2-equivariant K-theory of the complement of the complexification of a real hyperplane arrangement. We compute the rational K and KO rings, and give two different combinatorial descriptions of the subring of the integral KO ring generated by line bundles.Comment: 11 pages, no figures; final version, to appear in Topology and its Application

Searches for TeV-scale particles at the LHC using jet shapes

New particles at the TeV scale can decay hadronically with strongly collimated jets, thus the standard reconstruction methods based on invariant-masses of well-separated jets can fail. We discuss how to identify such particles in pp collisions at the LHC using jet shapes which help to reduce the contribution of QCD-induced events. We focus on a rather generic example X to ttbar to hadrons, with X being a heavy particle, but the approach is well suited for reconstruction of other decay channels characterized by a cascade decay of known states.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figure