Searches for New Physics

International audienceReview of prospects for discovery of new physics signals at LEP2. The areas covered include SUSY, exotic fermions, BESS models, leptoquarks, virtual effects and CP violating observables

Searches for new physics

This is the final report of the Workshop on Physics at LEP2, held at CERN during 1995. The first part of vol. 1 is devoted to aspects of machine physics of particular relevance to experiments, including the energy, luminosity and interaction regions, as well as the measurement of beam energy. The second part of vol. 1 is a relatively concise, but fairly complete, handbook on the physics of e+ e- annihilation above the WW threshold and up to $\sqrt{s} \approx 200$ GeV. It contains discussions on WW cross-sections and distributions, W mass determination, Standard Model processes, QCD and gamma--gamma physics, as well as aspects of discovery physics, such as Higgs, new particle searches, triple gauge boson couplings and Z'. The second volume contains a review of the existing Monte Carlo generators for LEP2 physics. These include generators for WW physics, QCD and gamma--gamma processes, Bhabha scattering and discovery physics. A special effort was made to co-ordinate the different parts, with a view to achieving a systematic and balanced review of the subject, rather than just publishing a collection of separate contributions

Precision Electroweak Measurements on the Z resonance.

We report on the final electroweak measurements performed with data taken at the Z resonance by the experiments operating at the electron–positron colliders SLC and LEP. The data consist of 17 million Z decays accumulated by the ALEPH, DELPHI, L3 and OPAL experiments at LEP, and 600 thousand Z decays by the SLD experiment using a polarised beam at SLC. The measurements include cross-sections, forward–backward asymmetries and polarised asymmetries. The mass and width of the Z boson, mZ and ΓZ, and its couplings to fermions, for example the ρ parameter and the effective electroweak mixing angle for leptons, are precisely measured: The number of light neutrino species is determined to be 2.9840±0.0082, in agreement with the three observed generations of fundamental fermions. The results are compared to the predictions of the Standard Model (SM). At the Z-pole, electroweak radiative corrections beyond the running of the QED and QCD coupling constants are observed with a significance of five standard deviations, and in agreement with the Standard Model. Of the many Z-pole measurements, the forward–backward asymmetry in b-quark production shows the largest difference with respect to its SM expectation, at the level of 2.8 standard deviations. Through radiative corrections evaluated in the framework of the Standard Model, the Z-pole data are also used to predict the mass of the top quark, , and the mass of the W boson, . These indirect constraints are compared to the direct measurements, providing a stringent test of the SM. Using in addition the direct measurements of mt and mW, the mass of the as yet unobserved SM Higgs boson is predicted with a relative uncertainty of about 50% and found to be less than at 95% confidence level