Quartic Gauge Couplings and the Radiation Zero in pp to l nu gamma gamma events at the LHC

We report a study of the process pp to l nu gamma gamma at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, using a leading order partonic-level event generator interfaced to the Pythia program for showering and hadronisation and a with a generic detector simulation. The process is sensitive to possible anomalous quartic gauge boson couplings of the form W W gamma gamma. It is shown how unitarity-safe limits may be placed on these anomalous couplings by applying a binned maximum likelihood fit to the distribution of the two-photon invariant mass, M(gamma gamma), below a cutoff of 1TeV. Assuming 30fb-1 of integrated luminosity, the expected limits are two orders of magnitude tighter than those available from LEP. It is also demonstrated how the Standard Model radiation zero feature of the qq to W gamma gamma process may be observed in the difference between the two-photon and charged lepton pseudo-rapidities.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

A Positive-Weight Next-to-Leading-Order Monte Carlo for Z Pair Hadroproduction

We present a first application of a previously published method for the computation of QCD processes that is accurate at next-to-leading order, and that can be interfaced consistently to standard shower Monte Carlo programs. We have considered Z pair production in hadron-hadron collisions, a process whose complexity is sufficient to test the general applicability of the method. We have interfaced our result to the HERWIG and PYTHIA shower Monte Carlo programs. Previous work on next-to-leading order corrections in a shower Monte Carlo (the MC@NLO program) may involve the generation of events with negative weights, that are avoided with the present method. We have compared our results with those obtained with MC@NLO, and found remarkable consistency. Our method can also be used as a standalone, alternative implementation of QCD corrections, with the advantage of positivity, improved convergence, and next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy in the region of small transverse momentum of the radiated parton.Comment: 33 pages, 10 figure

Azimuthal anisotropy of jet quenching at LHC

We analyze the azimuthal anisotropy of jet spectra due to energy loss of hard partons in quark-gluon plasma, created initially in nuclear overlap zone in collisions with non-zero impact parameter. The calculations are performed for semi-central Pb-Pb collisions at LHC energy.Comment: Talk given at Fourth International Conference "Physics and Astrophysics of Quark-Gluon Plasma", November 26-30, 2001; 4 pages including 4 eps-figure

Report of the QCD Working Group

The activities of the QCD working group concentrated on improving the understanding and Monte Carlo simulation of multi-jet final states due to hard QCD processes at LEP, i.e. quark-antiquark plus multi-gluon and/or secondary quark production, with particular emphasis on four-jet final states and b-quark mass effects. Specific topics covered are: relevant developments in the main event generators PYTHIA, HERWIG and ARIADNE; the new multi-jet generator APACIC++; description and tuning of inclusive (all-flavour) jet rates; quark mass effects in the three- and four-jet rates; mass, higher-order and hadronization effects in four-jet angular and shape distributions; b-quark fragmentation and gluon splitting into b-quarks.Comment: 95 pages, 48 figures, contribution to Proceedings of the LEP2 Monte Carlo Workshop. References for NLO 4-jet matrix elements adde

Finite-Width Effects in Top Quark Production at Hadron Colliders

Production cross sections for t\bar{t} and t\bar{t}j events at hadron colliders are calculated, including finite width effects and off resonance contributions for the entire decay chain, t --> bW --> b\ell\nu, for both top quarks. Resulting background rates to Higgs search at the CERN LHC are updated for inclusive H --> WW studies and for H --> \tau\tau and H --> WW decays in weak boson fusion events. Finite width effects are large, increasing t\bar{t}(j) rates by 20% or more, after typical cuts which are employed for top-background rejection.Comment: 32 pages, 11 figures, 7 tables; minor changes, reference added, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Incorporating next-to-leading order matrix elements for hadronic diboson production in showering event generators

A method for incorporating information from next-to-leading order QCD matrix elements for hadronic diboson production into showering event generators is presented. In the hard central region (high jet transverse momentum) where perturbative QCD is reliable, events are sampled according to the first order tree level matrix element. In the soft and collinear regions next-to-leading order corrections are approximated by calculating the differential cross section across the phase space accessible to the parton shower using the first order (virtual graphs included) matrix element. The parton shower then provides an all-orders exclusive description of parton emissions. Events generated in this way provide a physical result across the entire jet transverse momentum spectrum, have next-to-leading order normalization everywhere, and have positive definite event weights. The method is generalizable without modification to any color singlet production process.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figure

Top Pair Production Beyond Double-Pole Approximation: pp, pp~ --> 6 Fermions and 0, 1 or 2 Additional Partons

Hadron collider cross sections for tt~ production and di-lepton, single-lepton and all-jet decays with up to 2 additional jets are calculated using complete LO matrix elements with 6-, 7- and 8-particle final states. The fixed-width, complex-mass and overall-factor schemes (FWS, CMS & OFS) are employed and the quality of narrow-width and double-pole approximations (NWA & DPA) is investigated for inclusive production and suppressed backgrounds to new particle searches. NWA and DPA cross sections differ by 1% or less. The inclusion of sub- and non-resonant amplitudes effects a cross section increase of 5-8% at pp supercolliders, but only minor changes at the Tevatron. On-shell tt~/Wtb backgrounds for the H --> WW decay in weak boson fusion, the hadronic \tau decay of a heavy H^\pm and the \phi --> hh --> \tau\tau bb~ radion decay at the LHC are updated, with corrections ranging from 3% to 30%. FWS and CMS cross sections are uniformly consistent, but OFS cross sections are up to 6% smaller for some backgrounds.Comment: 20 pages, 6 tables, 1 figur

Determining the Higgs Boson Self Coupling at Hadron Colliders

Inclusive Standard Model Higgs boson pair production at hadron colliders has the capability to determine the Higgs boson self-coupling, lambda. We present a detailed analysis of the gg\to HH\to (W^+W^-)(W^+W^-)\to (jjl^\pm\nu)(jj{l'}^\pm\nu) and gg\to HH\to (W^+W^-)(W^+W^-)\to (jjl^\pm\nu)({l'}^\pm\nu {l''}^\mp\nu) (l, {l'}, {l''}=e, \mu) signal channels, and the relevant background processes, for the CERN Large Hadron Collider, and a future Very Large Hadron Collider operating at a center-of-mass energy of 200 TeV. We also derive quantitative sensitivity limits for lambda. We find that it should be possible at the LHC with design luminosity to establish that the Standard Model Higgs boson has a non-zero self-coupling and that lambda / lambda_{SM} can be restricted to a range of 0-3.8 at 95% confidence level (CL) if its mass is between 150 and 200 GeV. At a 200 TeV collider with an integrated luminosity of 300 fb^{-1}, lambda can be determined with an accuracy of 8 - 25% at 95% CL in the same mass range.Comment: 28 pages, Revtex3, 9 figures, 3 table

Lepton flavor violating signals of a little Higgs model at the high energy linear e+e−e^{+}e^{-} colliders

Littlest Higgs $(LH)$ model predicts the existence of the doubly charged scalars $\Phi^{\pm\pm}$, which generally have large flavor changing couplings to leptons. We calculate the contributions of $\Phi^{\pm\pm}$ to the lepton flavor violating $(LFV)$ processes $l_{i}\to l_{j}\gamma$ and $l_{i}\to l_{j}l_{k}l_{k}$, and compare our numerical results with the current experimental upper limits on these processes. We find that some of these processes can give severe constraints on the coupling constant $Y_{ij}$ and the mass parameter $M_{\Phi}$. Taking into account the constraints on these free parameters, we further discuss the possible lepton flavor violating signals of $\Phi^{\pm\pm}$ at the high energy linear $e^{+}e^{-}$ collider $(ILC)$ experiments. Our numerical results show that the possible signals of $\Phi^{\pm\pm}$ might be detected via the subprocesses $e^{\pm}e^{\pm}\to l^{\pm}l^{\pm}$ in the future $ILC$ experiments.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures. Discussions and references added, typos correcte

Focus Point SUSY at the LHC Revisited

The estimation of the backgrounds for gluino signals in focus point supersymmetry is extended by including the backgrounds from the production of four third generation quarks in the analysis. We find that these backgrounds are negligible if one uses the strong selection criteria proposed in the literature (including this analysis) for heavy gluino searches. Softer selection criteria often recommended for lighter gluino searches yield backgrounds which are small but numerically significant. We have also repeated the more conventional background calculations and compared our results with the other groups. We find that the size of the total residual background estimated by different groups using different event generators and hard kinematical cuts agree approximately. In view of the theoretical uncertainties in the leading order signal and background cross sections mainly due to the choice of the QCD scale, the gluino mass reach at the LHC cannot be pinpointed. However, requiring a signal with $\rm\geq 3$ tagged b-jets (instead of the standard choice of $\rm\geq 2$) it is shown that gluino masses close to 2 TeV can be probed at the LHC for a range of reasonable choices of the QCD scale for an integrated luminosity of 300 fb$^{-1}$.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, minor typos correctio