Next-to-leading order QCD corrections to Higgs production at a future lepton-proton collider

Crucial information on the coupling of the Higgs boson to bottom quarks is expected from Higgs production in association with a forward tagging jet at a future high-energy lepton-proton collider. In order to control the theoretical uncertainties of the signal process, the impact of radiative corrections has to be quantified. We present the full next-to-leading order QCD corrections to e- p -> e- j H and e- p -> nu_e j H in the form of a flexible Monte-Carlo program allowing for the calculation of cross sections and kinematic distributions within experimentally feasible selection cuts. QCD corrections are found to be very small for cross sections, while the shape distortion of distributions can be as large as 20%. Residual scale uncertainties at next-to-leading order are at the permille level.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figure

SUSY parameter determination

The impact of the LHC, SLHC and the ILC on the precision of the determination of supersymmetric parameters is investigated. In particular, in the point SPS1a the measurements performed at the ILC will improve by an order of magnitude the precision obtained by the LHC alone. The SLHC with respect to the LHC has the potential to reduce the errors by a factor two.Comment: Invited talk at 2005 International Linear Collider Physics and Detector Workshop and Second ILC Accelerator Workshop, Snowmass, CO(Snowmass05) 3 pages, LaTe

Measuring CP Violating Phases at a Future Linear Collider

At a future Linear Collider one will be able to determine the masses of charginos and neutralinos and their pair production cross sections to high accuracies. We show how systematically including the cross sections into the analysis improves the measurement of the underlying mass parameters, including potential CP violating phases. In addition, we investigate how experimental errors will affect the determination of these parameters. We present a first estimate on the lower limit of observable small phases and on the accuracy in determining large phases.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, RevTeX3.1, Version to be published in Physics Letters B, physics setup improved, figures added, conclusions unchange

SFitter: Reconstructing the MSSM Lagrangian from LHC data

Once supersymmetry is found at the LHC, the question arises what are the fundamental parameters of the Lagrangian. The answer to this question should thereby not be biased by assumptions on high-scale models. SFitter is a tool designed for this task. Taking LHC (and possibly ILC) data as input it scans the TeV-scale MSSM parameter space using its new weighted Markov chain technique. Using this scan it determines a list of best-fitting parameter points. Additionally a log-likelihood map is calculated, which can be reduced to lower-dimensional Frequentist's profile likelihoods or Bayesian probability maps.Comment: Submitted for the SUSY07 proceedings, 4 pages, LaTeX, 4 eps figure

SUSY Particle Production at the Tevatron

The calculation of the next-to-leading order SUSY-QCD corrections to the production of squarks, gluinos and gauginos at the Tevatron is reviewed. The NLO corrections stabilize the theoretical predictions of the various production cross sections significantly and lead to sizeable enhancements of the most relevant cross sections for scales near the average mass of the produced massive particles. We discuss the phenomenological consequences of the results on present and future experimental analyses.Comment: 13 pages, latex, 9 figures, further extended versio

Probing the Higgs self-coupling at hadron colliders using rare decays

We investigate Higgs boson pair production at hadron colliders for Higgs boson masses m_H\leq 140 GeV and rare decay of one of the two Higgs bosons. While in the Standard Model the number of events is quite low at the LHC, a first, albeit not very precise, measurement of the Higgs self-coupling is possible in the gg -> HH -> b\bar{b}\gamma\gamma channel. A luminosity-upgraded LHC could improve this measurement considerably. A 200 TeV VLHC could make a measurement of the Higgs self-coupling competitive with a next-generation linear collider. In the MSSM we find a significant region with observable Higgs pair production in the small \tan\beta regime, where resonant production of two light Higgs bosons might be the only hint at the LHC of an MSSM Higgs sector.Comment: Revtex, 23 pages, 4 tables, 7 figure

Maximum Significance at the LHC and Higgs Decays to Muons

We present a new way to define and compute the maximum significance achievable for signal and background processes at the LHC, using all available phase space information. As an example, we show that a light Higgs boson produced in weak--boson fusion with a subsequent decay into muons can be extracted from the backgrounds. The method, aimed at phenomenological studies, can be incorporated in parton--level event generators and accommodate parametric descriptions of detector effects for selected observables.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, changes to wording and new references, published versio

Exploring compressed supersymmetry with same-sign top quarks at the Large Hadron Collider

In compressed supersymmetry, a light top squark naturally mediates efficient neutralino pair annihilation to govern the thermal relic abundance of dark matter. I study the LHC signal of same-sign leptonic top-quark decays from gluino and squark production, which follows from gluino decays to top plus stop followed by the stop decaying to a charm quark and the LSP in these models. Measurements of the numbers of jets with heavy-flavor tags in the same-sign lepton events can be used to confirm the origin of the signal. Summed transverse momentum observables provide an estimate of an effective superpartner mass, which is correlated with the gluino mass. Measurements of invariant mass endpoints from the visible products of gluino decays do not allow direct determination of superpartner masses, but can place constraints on them, including lower bounds on the gluino mass as a function of the top-squark mass.Comment: 22 pages. v2: Discussion of competition between 2-body and 4-body stop decays corrected. References adde