Lepton jets from radiating dark matter
Journal of High Energy Physics 2015.7 (2015): 045 reproduced by permission of Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA)
Searching for long-lived particles beyond the Standard Model at the Large Hadron Collider
Particles beyond the Standard Model (SM) can generically have lifetimes that are long compared to SM particles at the weak scale. When produced at experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, these longlived particles (LLPs) can decay far from the interaction vertex of the primary proton–proton collision. Such LLP signatures are distinct from those of promptly decaying particles that are targeted by the majority of searches for new physics at the LHC, often requiring customized techniques to identify, for example, significantly displaced decay vertices, tracks with atypical properties, and short track segments. Given their non-standard nature, a comprehensive overview of LLP…
Stellar Wakes from Dark Matter Subhalos
We propose a novel method utilizing stellar kinematic data to detect low-mass substructure in the Milky Way's dark matter halo. By probing characteristic wakes that a passing dark matter subhalo leaves in the phase space distribution of ambient halo stars, we estimate sensitivities down to subhalo masses $\sim 10^7\,M_\odot$ or below. The detection of such subhalos would have implications for dark-matter and cosmological models that predict modifications to the halo-mass function at low halo masses. We develop an analytic formalism for describing the perturbed stellar phase-space distributions, and we demonstrate through simulations the ability to detect subhalos using the phase-space model…
New signatures of flavor violating Higgs couplings
We explore several novel LHC signatures arising from quark or lepton flavor violating couplings in the Higgs sector, and we constrain such couplings using LHC data. Since the largest signals are possible in channels involving top quarks or tau leptons, we consider in particular the following flavor violating processes: (1) $pp \to thh$ (top plus di-Higgs final state) arising from a dimension six coupling of up-type quarks to three insertions of the Higgs field. We develop a search strategy for this final state and demonstrate that detection is possible at the high luminosity LHC if flavor violating top--up--Higgs couplings are not too far below the current limit. (2) $pp \to tH^0$, where $H…
Angular observables for spin discrimination in boosted diboson final states
We investigate the prospects for spin determination of a heavy diboson resonance using angular observables. Focusing in particular on boosted fully hadronic final states, we detail both the differences in signal efficiencies and distortions of differential distributions resulting from various jet substructure techniques. We treat the 2 TeV diboson excess as a case study, but our results are generally applicable to any future discovery in the diboson channel. Scrutinizing ATLAS and CMS analyses at 8 TeV and 13 TeV, we find that the specific cuts employed in these analyses have a tremendous impact on the discrimination power between different signal hypotheses. We discuss modified cuts that c…