Exploring the Energy (and Lifetime) Frontiers with the CMS Experiment – Christopher Hill

Date: Thu. April 21st, 2011, 4:15 pm-5:15 pm
Location: Rockefeller 301

In November 2010, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN completed its first physics run of proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV. These data, which have been analyzed in recent months, have provided us with our first glimpse of the energy frontier. I will review why particle physicists are so excited about what we might find as we explore this newly accessible regime and present some of the scientific results which have already emerged. There are, however, a number of scenarios of physics beyond the Standard Model which predict new heavy quasi-stable particles at the LHC which could spoil the party; they would live too long to be detected with normal operation of the CMS detector (or indeed any other past /present particle physics experiment). I will explain, and present the results of employing, a novel solution to this problem that I’ve implemented within the CMS experiment that enables this “lifetime frontier” to be explored too.