Diffraction at the LHC: a non-technical Introduction

In diffractive interactions of protons or nuclei a violent collision can occur that leaves the forward going particle completely intact -with probability determined by the structure of the proton or nucleus. At very high energies these collisions also occur with both incident particles remaining intact. This is called central exclusive production. If a new particle, such as the Higgs boson, were produced exclusively this process would give a precise measurement of its mass and test for expected properties of the Higgs. Because of its unusual features this process is also a promising discovery tool. In this paper I focus on analogous electromagnetic processes because many aspects apply to both- particularly the role of coherence. Also, topics in diffraction with nuclear beams are based on electromagnetic interactions. I also discuss two proposed measurements in ATLAS with Pb beams and with proton beams (diffractive Higgs production).Comment: Review talk presented at XII Mexican Workshop on Particles and Fields. 15 pages, 12 figures

R&D for a Dedicated Fast Timing Layer in the CMS Endcap Upgrade

The PhaseII Upgrades of CMS are being planned for the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) era when the mean number of interactions per beam crossing ("in-time pileup") is expected to reach ~140-200. The potential backgrounds arising from mis-associated jets and photon showers, for example, during event reconstruction could be reduced if physics objects are tagged with an "event time". This tag is fully complementary to the "event vertex" which is already commonly used to reduce mis-reconstruction. Since the tracking vertex resolution is typically ~10^{-3} (50 micron/4.8cm) of the rms vertex distribution, whereas only ~10^{-1} (i.e. 20 vs.170 picoseconds (psec)) is demonstrated for timing, it is often assumed that only photon (i.e. EM calorimeter or shower-max) timing is of interest. We show that the optimal solution will likely be a single timing layer which measures both charged particle and photon time (a pre-shower layer).Comment: Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on Picosecond Photon Sensors for Physics and Medical Applications, Clermont Ferrand. 9 pages, 4 figure

Diffraction Dissociation - 50 Years Later

The field of Diffraction Dissociation, which is the subject of this workshop, began 50 years ago with the analysis of deuteron stripping in low energy collisions with nuclei. We return to the subject in a modern context- deuteron dissociation in $\sqrt{s_{NN}}= 200$ GeV d-Au collisions recorded during the 2003 RHIC run in the PHENIX experiment. At RHIC energy, d$\to$n+p proceeds predominantly (90%) through Electromagnetic Dissociation and the remaining fraction via the hadronic shadowing described by Glauber. Since the dissociation cross section has a small theoretical error we adopt this process to normalize other cross sections measured in RHIC.Comment: Submitted to: Proceedings of DIS05 conference, Diffraction and Vector Meson Working Group. 5 pages,2 figure