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Dirk Zerwas

Publications and source records attributed to Dirk Zerwas.

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Measuring Hidden Higgs and Strongly-Interacting Higgs Scenarios

Higgs couplings can be affected by physics beyond the Standard Model. We study modifications through interactions with a hidden sector and in specific composite Higgs models accessible at the LHC. Both scenarios give rise to congruent patterns of universal, or partially universal, shifts. In addition, Higgs decays to the hidden sector may lead to invisible decay modes which we also exploit. Experimental bounds on such potential modifications will measure the concordance of an observed Higgs boson with the Standard Model.

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Stop Reconstruction with Tagged Tops

At the LHC combinatorics make it unlikely that we will be able to observe stop pair production with a decay to a semi-leptonic top pair and missing energy for generic supersymmetric mass spectra. Using a Standard-Model top tagger on fully hadronic top decays we can not only extract the stop signal but also measure the top momentum. To illustrate the promise of tagging tops with moderate boost we include a detailed discussion of our HEPTopTagger algorithm.

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Measuring Supersymmetry

Supersymmetry is an attractive extension of the standard model of particle physics. It associates to every bosonic degree of freedom a fermionic one and vice versa. Supersymmetry unifies the coupling constants of the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces at a high scale and provides a candidate for the elusive dark matter. Supersymmetry could be discovered at the LHC, the proton--proton collider at CERN which has started operations in 2008. The LHC is foreseen to have a center--of--mass energy of 14~TeV, opening up a new mass range to be explored to search for supersymmetric particles with the ATLAS and CMS experiments. The development and production of electronics for these detectors has been a challenge, e.g. for the readout board for the electromagnetic calorimeter. Reconstructing the physics events with the best precision, in particular the reconstruction and identification of electrons and photons in the large QCD background has been prepared in extensive test beam studies and Monte Carlo simulations. If the Higgs boson and supersymmetry are discovered, the properties of the (s)particles such as the masses, branching ratios must be measured precisely, either at the LHC or at a future e+e- linear collider. The SFitter project aims to determine the underlying theoretical model parameters from the correlated experimental measurements including theoretical errors. The methods are applied to the extraction of the fundamental parameters of supersymmetry as well the measurement of the Higgs boson couplings at the LHC. The extrapolation of the supersymmetric parameters from the weak scale to the Grand Unification Scale could provide the basis towards the inclusion of gravity.

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Extracting the fundamental parameters

If supersymmetry is discovered at the LHC, the extraction of the fundamental parameters will be a formidable task. In such a system where measurements depend on different combinations of the parameters in a highly correlated system, the identification of the true parameter set in an efficient way necessitates the development and use of sophisticated methods. A rigorous treatment of experimental and theoretical errors is necessary to determine the precision of the measurement of the fundamental parameters. The techniques developed for this endeavor can also be applied to similar problems such as the determination of the Higgs boson couplings at the LHC.

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Measuring the Higgs Sector

If we find a light Higgs boson at the LHC, there should be many observable channels which we can exploit to measure the relevant parameters in the Higgs sector. We use the SFitter framework to map these measurements on the parameter space of a general weak-scale effective theory with a light Higgs state of mass 120 GeV. Our analysis benefits from the parameter determination tools and the error treatment used in new--physics searches, to study individual parameters and their error bars as well as parameter correlations.

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Supersymmetry

The determination of supersymmetric parameters at the LHC in favorable as well as difficult scenarios is presented. If discovered and measured at the LHC and the ILC, supersymmetry may provide a link between collider physics and cosmology.

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Extraction of SUSY Parameters from Collider Data

The extraction of the parameters of the supersymmetric Lagrangian is discusse d. Particular emphasis is put on the rigorous treatment of experimental and theo retical errors. While the LHC can provide a valuable first estimate of the parameters, the combination of LHC and ILC will be nece ssary to determine with high precision the parameters of the MSSM.

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Measuring Supersymmetry

If new physics is found at the LHC (and the ILC) the reconstruction of the underlying theory should not be biased by assumptions about high--scale models. For the mapping of many measurements onto high--dimensional parameter spaces we introduce SFitter with its new weighted Markov chain technique. SFitter constructs an exclusive likelihood map, determines the best--fitting parameter point and produces a ranked list of the most likely parameter points. Using the example of the TeV--scale supersymmetric Lagrangian we show how a high--dimensional likelihood map will generally include degeneracies and strong correlations. SFitter allows us to study such model--parameter spaces employing Bayesian as well as frequentist constructions. We illustrate in detail how it should be possible to analyze high--dimensional new--physics parameter spaces like the TeV--scale MSSM at the LHC. A combination of LHC and ILC measurements might well be able to completely cover highly complex TeV--scale parameter spaces.

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SFITTER: SUSY Parameter Analysis at LHC and LC

SFITTER is a new analysis tool to determine supersymmetric model parameters from collider measurements. Using the set of supersymmetric mass measurements at the LC and at the LHC we show how both colliders probe different sectors of the MSSM Lagrangian. This observation is a strong motivation to move from a parameter fit assuming a certain model to the unconstrained weak-scale MSSM Lagrangian. We argue how the technical challenges can be dealt with in a combined fit/grid approach with full correlations.

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