arXiv subjects

Benjamin Fuks

Publications and source records attributed to Benjamin Fuks.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

arXiv2014

MadAnalysis 5: status and new developments

MadAnalysis 5 is a new Python/C++ package facilitating phenomenological analyses that can be performed in the framework of Monte Carlo simulations of collisions to be produced in high-energy physics experiments. It allows, by means of a user-friendly interpreter, to perform professional physics analyses in a very simple way. Starting from event samples as generated by any Monte Carlo event generator, large classes of selections can be implemented through intuitive commands, many standard kinematical distributions can be automatically represented by histograms and all results are eventually gathered into detailed Html and latex reports. In this work, we briefly report on the latest developments of the code, focusing on the interface to the FastJet program dedicated to jet reconstruction.

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arXiv2014

FeynRules 2.0 - A complete toolbox for tree-level phenomenology

FeynRules is a Mathematica-based package which addresses the implementation of particle physics models, which are given in the form of a list of fields, parameters and a Lagrangian, into high-energy physics tools. It calculates the underlying Feynman rules and outputs them to a form appropriate for various programs such as CalcHEP, FeynArts, MadGraph, Sherpa and Whizard. Since the original version, many new features have been added: support for two-component fermions, spin-3/2 and spin-2 fields, superspace notation and calculations, automatic mass diagonalization, completely general FeynArts output, a new universal FeynRules output interface, a new Whizard interface, automatic 1 to 2 decay width calculation, improved speed and efficiency, new guidelines for validation and a new web-based validation package. With this feature set, FeynRules enables models to go from theory to simulation and comparison with experiment quickly, efficiently and accurately.

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arXiv2014

Characterizing New Physics with Polarized Beams at High-Energy Hadron Colliders

The TeV energy region is currently being explored by both the ATLAS and CMS experiments of the Large Hadron Collider and phenomena beyond the Standard Model are extensively searched for. Large fractions of the parameter space of many models have already been excluded, and the ranges covered by the searches will certainly be increased by the upcoming energy and luminosity upgrades. If new physics has to be discovered in the forthcoming years, the ultimate goal of the high-energy physics program will consist of fully characterizing the newly-discovered degrees of freedom in terms of properties such as their masses, spins and couplings. The scope of this paper is to show how the availability of polarized beams at high-energy proton-proton colliders could yield a unique discriminating power between different beyond the Standard Model scenarios. We first discuss in a model-independent way how this discriminating power arises from the differences between polarized and unpolarized parton distribution functions. We then demonstrate how polarized beams allow one not only to disentangle different production mechanisms giving the same final-state signature, but also to obtain information on the parameters of the hypothetical new physics sector of the theory. This is illustrated in the case of a particular class of scenarios leading to monotop production. We consider three specific models that could produce a monotop signature in unpolarized proton collisions, and show how they could be distinguished by means of single- and double-spin asymmetries in polarized collisions. Our results are presented for both the Large Hadron Collider operating at a center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV and a recently proposed Future Circular Collider assumed to collide protons at a center-of-mass energy of 100 TeV.

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arXiv2014

Phenomenology of the Higgs Effective Lagrangian via FeynRules

The Higgs discovery and the lack of any other hint for new physics favor a description of non-standard Higgs physics in terms of an effective field theory. We present an implementation of a general Higgs effective Lagrangian containing operators up to dimension six in the framework of FeynRules and provide details on the translation between the mass and interaction bases, in particular for three- and four-point interaction vertices involving Higgs and gauge bosons. We illustrate the strengths of this implementation by using the UFO interface of FeynRules capable to generate model files that can be understood by the MadGraph 5 event generator and that have the specificity to contain all interaction vertices, without any restriction on the number of external legs or on the complexity of the Lorentz structures. We then investigate several new physics effects in total rates and differential distributions for different Higgs production modes, including gluon fusion, associated production with a gauge boson and di-Higgs production. We finally study contact interactions of gauge and Higgs bosons to fermions.

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arXiv2014

Multilepton signals of gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking at the LHC

We investigate multilepton LHC signals arising from electroweak processes involving sleptons. We consider the framework of general gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking, focusing on models where the low mass region of the superpartner spectrum consists of the three generations of charged sleptons and the nearly massless gravitino. We demonstrate how such models can provide an explanation for the anomalous four lepton events recently observed by the CMS collaboration, while satisfying other existing experimental constraints. The best fit to the CMS data is obtained for a selectron/smuon mass of around 145 GeV and a stau mass of around 90 GeV. These models also give rise to final states with more than four leptons, offering alternative channels in which they can be probed and we estimate the corresponding production rates at the LHC.

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arXiv2014

Supersymmetry - When Theory Inspires Experimental Searches

We review, in the first part of this work, many pioneering works on supersymmetry and organize these results to show how supersymmetric quantum field theories arise from spin-statistics, Nœther and a series of no-go theorems. We then introduce the so-called superspace formalism dedicated to the natural construction of supersymmetric Lagrangians and detail the most popular mechanisms leading to soft supersymmetry breaking. As an application, we describe the building of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model and investigate current experimental limits on the parameter space of its most constrained versions. To this aim, we use various flavor, electroweak precision, cosmology and collider data. We then perform several phenomenological excursions beyond this minimal setup and probe effects due to non-minimal flavor violation in the squark sector, revisiting various constraints arising from indirect searches for superpartners. Next, we use several interfaced high-energy physics tools, including the FeynRules package and its UFO interface that we describe in detail, to study the phenomenology of two non- minimal supersymmetric models at the Large Hadron Collider. We estimate the sensitivity of this machine to monotop production in R-parity violating supersymmetry and sgluon-induced multitop production in R-symmetric supersymmetry. We then generalize the results to new physics scenarios designed from a bottom-up strategy and finally depict, from a theorist point of view, a search for monotops at the Tevatron motivated by these findings.

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arXiv2014

Revisiting slepton pair production at the Large Hadron Collider

Motivated by the shift in experimental attention towards electroweak supersymmetric particle production at the CERN LHC, we update in this paper our precision predictions at next-to-leading order of perturbative QCD matched to resummation at the next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy for direct slepton pair production in proton-proton collisions. Simplified models, now commonly adopted by the experimental collaborations for selectrons and smuons as well as mixing staus, are used as benchmarks for total cross sections at achieved and future center-of-mass energies. They are presented together with the corresponding scale and parton density uncertainties in graphical and tabular form for future reference. Using modern Monte Carlo techniques, we also reanalyze recent ATLAS and CMS slepton searches in light of our precision cross sections and for various assumptions on the decomposition of the sleptons and their neutralino decay products.

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arXiv2013

Monotop phenomenology at the Large Hadron Collider

We investigate new physics scenarios where systems comprised of a single top quark accompanied by missing transverse energy, dubbed monotops, can be produced at the LHC. Following a simplified model approach, we describe all possible monotop production modes via an effective theory and estimate the sensitivity of the LHC, assuming 20 fb$^{-1}$ of collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV, to the observation of a monotop state. Considering both leptonic and hadronic top quark decays, we show that large fractions of the parameter space are reachable and that new physics particles with masses ranging up to 1.5 TeV can leave hints within the 2012 LHC dataset, assuming moderate new physics coupling strengths.

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arXiv2013

New developments in FeynRules

The program FeynRules is a Mathematica package developed to facilitate the implementation of new physics theories into high-energy physics tools. Starting from a minimal set of information such as the model gauge symmetries, its particle content, parameters and Lagrangian, FeynRules provides all necessary routines to extract automatically from the Lagrangian (that can also be computed semi-automatically for supersymmetric theories) the associated Feynman rules. These can be further exported to several Monte Carlo event generators through dedicated interfaces, as well as translated into a Python library, under the so-called UFO model format, agnostic of the model complexity, especially in terms of Lorentz and/or color structures appearing in the vertices or of number of external legs. In this work, we briefly report on the most recent new features that have been added to FeynRules, including full support for spin-3/2 fermions, a new module allowing for the automated diagonalization of the particle spectrum and a new set of routines dedicated to decay width calculations.

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arXiv2013

Doubly-charged particles at the Large Hadron Collider

In this work we investigate the production and signatures of doubly-charged particles at the Large Hadron Collider. We start with the Standard Model particle content and representations and add generic doubly-charged exotic particles. We classify these doubly-charged states according to their spin, considering scalar, fermionic and vectorial fields, and according to their SU(2)L representation, being chosen to be either trivial, fundamental, or adjoint. We write the most general interactions between them and the Standard Model sector and study their production modes and possible decay channels. We then probe how they can most likely be observed and how particles with different spin and SU(2)L representations could be possibly distinguished.

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arXiv2013

Chargino and neutralino production at the Large Hadron Collider in left-right supersymmetric models

We present a complete and extensive analysis of associated chargino and neutralino production in the framework of a supersymmetric theory augmented by left-right symmetry. This model provides additional gaugino and higgsino states in both the neutral and charged sectors, thus potentially enhancing new physics signals at the LHC. For a choice of benchmark scenarios, we calculate cross sections for 7, 8 and 14 TeV. We then simulate events expected to be produced at the LHC, and classify them according to the number of leptons in the final state. We devise methods to reduce the background and compare the signals with consistently simulated events for the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. We pinpoint promising scenarios where left-right symmetric supersymmetric signals can be distinguished both from background and from the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model events.

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arXiv2013

Probing top anomalous couplings at the LHC with trilepton signatures in the single top mode

We investigate trilepton final states to probe top anomalous couplings at the Large Hadron Collider. We focus on events originating from the associated production of a single top quark with a Z-boson, a channel sensitive to several flavor-changing neutral interactions of top and up/charm quarks. In particular, we explore a way to access simultaneously their anomalous couplings to Z-bosons and gluons and derive the discovery potential of trilepton final states to such interactions with 20 fb-1 of 8 TeV collisions. We show that effective coupling strengths of O(0.1-1) TeV-1 can be reached. Equivalently, branching fractions of top quarks into lighter quarks and gluons or Z-bosons can be constrained to be below O(0.1-1)%.

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arXiv2013

Precision predictions for electroweak superpartner production at hadron colliders with Resummino

We describe the Resummino package, a C++ and Fortran program dedicated to precision calculations in the framework of gaugino and slepton pair production at hadron colliders. This code allows to calculate transverse-momentum and invariant-mass distributions as well as total cross sections by combining the next-to-leading order predictions obtained by means of perturbative QCD with the resummation of the large logarithmic contributions arising in the small transverse-momentum region and close to the production threshold. The results computed in this way benefit from reduced theoretical uncertainties, compared to a pure next-to-leading order approach as currently employed in the experimental analyses searching for sleptons and gauginos at hadron colliders. This is illustrated by using of Resummino in the context of a typical supersymmetric benchmark point dedicated to superpartner searches at the Large Hadron Collider.

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arXiv2013

QCD resummation in the framework of supersymmetry

Motivated by current searches for electroweak superpartners at the Large Hadron Collider, we present precision predictions for pair production of such particles in the framework of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. We make use of various QCD resummation formalisms and match the results to pure perturbative QCD computations. We study the impact of scale variations and compare our results to predictions obtained by means of traditionally used Monte Carlo event generators.

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arXiv2013

Searching for sgluons in multitop events at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV

Large classes of new physics theories predict the existence of new scalar states, commonly dubbed sgluons, lying in the adjoint representation of the QCD gauge group. Since these new fields are expected to decay into colored Standard Model particles, and in particular into one or two top quarks, these theories predict a possible enhancement of the hadroproduction rate associated with multitop final states. We therefore investigate multitop events produced at the Large Hadron Collider, running at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV, and employ those events to probe the possible existence of color adjoint scalar particles. We first construct a simplified effective field theory motivated by R-symmetric supersymmetric models where sgluon fields decay dominantly into top quarks. We then use this model to analyze the sensitivity of the Large Hadron Collider in both a multilepton plus jets and a single lepton plus jets channel. After having based our event selection strategy on the possible presence of two, three and four top quarks in the final state, we find that sgluon-induced new physics contributions to multitop cross sections as low as 10-100 fb can be excluded at the 95% confidence level, assuming an integrated luminosity of 20 inverse fb. Equivalently, sgluon masses of about 500-700 GeV can be reached for several classes of benchmark scenarios.

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arXiv2013

Automated mass spectrum generation for new physics

We describe an extension of the FeynRules package dedicated to the automatic generation of the mass spectrum associated with any Lagrangian-based quantum field theory. After introducing a simplified way to implement particle mixings, we present a new class of FeynRules functions allowing both for the analytical computation of all the model mass matrices and for the generation of a C++ package, dubbed ASperGe. This program can then be further employed for a numerical evaluation of the rotation matrices necessary to diagonalize the field basis. We illustrate these features in the context of the Two-Higgs-Doublet Model, the Minimal Left-Right Symmetric Standard Model and the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model.

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arXiv2012

Gaugino production in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV

Motivated by hints for a light Standard Model-like Higgs boson and a shift in experimental attention towards electroweak supersymmetry particle production at the CERN LHC, we update in this paper our precision predictions at next-to-leading order of perturbative QCD matched to resummation at the next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy for direct gaugino pair production in proton-proton collisions with a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV. Tables of total cross sections are presented together with the corresponding scale and parton density uncertainties for benchmark points adopted recently by the experimental collaborations, and figures are presented for up-to-date model lines attached to them. Since the experimental analyses are currently obtained with parton showers matched to multi-parton matrix elements, we also analyze the precision of this procedure by comparing invariant-mass and transverse-momentum distributions obtained in this way to those obtained with threshold and transverse-momentum resummation.

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arXiv2012

MadAnalysis 5, a user-friendly framework for collider phenomenology

We present MadAnalysis 5, a new framework for phenomenological investigations at particle colliders. Based on a C++ kernel, this program allows to efficiently perform, in a straightforward and user-friendly fashion, sophisticated physics analyses of event files such as those generated by a large class of Monte Carlo event generators. MadAnalysis 5 comes with two modes of running. The first one, easier to handle, uses the strengths of a powerful Python interface in order to implement physics analyses by means of a set of intuitive commands. The second one requires to implement the analyses in the C++ programming language, directly within the core of the analysis framework. This opens unlimited possibilities concerning the level of complexity which can be reached, being only limited by the programming skills and the originality of the user.

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