A Physics Show Performed by Students for Kids: From Mechanics to Elementary Particle Physics

We describe an initiative at the University of Bonn, where the students develop and perform a 2 hour physics show for school classes and the general public. The show is entertaining and educational and is aimed at children aged 10 and older. For the physics students this is a unique experience to apply their knowledge at an early stage and gives them the chance to develop skills in the public presentation of science, in front of 520 people per show. We have extended the activity to put on an elementary particle physics show for teenagers. Furthermore, local high schools have picked up the idea; their students put on similar shows for fellow students and parents. We would be interested in hearing about related activities elsewhere.Comment: 6 Pages, LateX, 3 Figures. High quality figures available from author. Journal submission notice adde

All Possible Lightest Supersymmetric Particles in R-Parity Violating mSUGRA Models and their Signals at the LHC

We consider minimal supergravity (mSUGRA) models with an additional R-parity violating operator at the grand unification scale. This can change the supersymmetric spectrum leading on the one hand to a sneutrino, smuon or squark as the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP). On the other hand, a wide parameter region is reopened, where the scalar tau is the LSP. It is vital to know the nature of the LSP, because supersymmetric particles normally cascade decay down to the LSP at collider experiments. We investigate in detail the conditions leading to non-neutralino LSP scenarios. We also present some typical LHC signatures.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, submitted for the proceedings of the SUSY09 conferenc

Contact Interactions Probe Effective Dark Matter Models at the LHC

Effective field theories provide a simple framework for probing possible dark matter (DM) models by reparametrising full interactions into a reduced number of operators with smaller dimensionality in parameter space. In many cases these models have four particle vertices, e.g. qqXX, leading to the pair production of dark matter particles, X, at a hadron collider from initial state quarks, q. In this analysis we show that for many fundamental DM models with s-channel DM couplings to qq-pairs, these effective vertices must also produce quark contact interactions (CI) of the form qqqq. The respective effective couplings are related by the common underlying theory which allows one to translate the upper limits from one coupling to the other. We show that at the LHC, the experimental limits on quark contact interactions give stronger translated limits on the DM coupling than the experimental searches for dark matter pair production.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Bounds on R-parity Violation from Resonant Slepton Production at the LHC

We consider the ATLAS and CMS searches for dijet resonances, as well as the ATLAS search for like-sign dimuon pairs at the LHC with 7 TeV center of mass energy. We interpret their exclusions in terms of bounds on the supersymmetric R-parity violating parameter space. For this we focus on resonant slepton production followed by the corresponding decay.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures, 3 table