LHC Physics

Christopher S. Hill
University of Bristol

Warwick Week
12th - 16th April, 2010

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 What these lectures will hopefully be

• A review of the reasons why will built the LHC, maybe a bit on how it works and
how it is currently performing

• A review of the detectors (and how they work, and are performing) and
experimental techniques that will be used at the LHC

• An introduction/review of the physics that we expect to see at the LHC (and what
we are already seeing …)

• An introduction/review of some of the physics we might see at the LHC

• Roughly 1 lecture on each of the above

• Convey the excitement of this unprecedented time for particle physics

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 What these lectures will not be

• I will not go into detail with respect to the maths involved in some of the
physics that we might encounter at the LHC

• I will not cover flavour physics at the LHC even though there is a dedicated
flavour physics experiment at the LHC (LHCb) … I presume this will be covered
by Tim

• I will not cover relativistic heavy-ion physics at the LHC even though there is a
dedicated relativistic heavy-ion physics experiment at the LHC (ALICE)

• Me standing up here deriving equations, and you busy scribbling it all down. I
hope that we can foster discussion on each of the topics that I cover

• Generous time will be allotted for such discussion

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 Outline of Lectures

• Lecture 1 - The LHC

• Lecture 2 - The CMS/ATLAS detectors

• Lecture 3 - Higgs Physics

• Lecture 4 - Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) Physics

• Schedule is flexible - can adjust to your (and my) tastes :)

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 Lecture 1 - Discovery, The LHC, and Collider
Physics

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 How are scientific discoveries made?

• I think there are really only three ways …

• By complete accident (though these

stories are often apocryphal)

• By very careful painstaking work,

looking at lots of mundane things and
noting discrepancies, etc.

• By looking somewhere we have never

looked before, usually with some new
apparatus that allows us to “see”
further

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 The LHC which started operation last year at
lower energies, is now routinely colliding at 7 The LHC is such an
TeV - significantly beyond that which has
been done before apparatus
Tuesday, 20 April 2010
 Energy is the key to unlocking small
distance scales

• From De Broglie:

λ= h
p
• Therefore by using particles with higher
and higher momenta

• Can resolve smaller and smaller

structures

• This mechanism, responsible for many of

the experimental discoveries of 20th
century particle physics

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 In Bohr’s Words

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 Cosmic rays are a good source of
high energy particles

• Nature provides plenty of such high

energy probes in the form of cosmic
rays

• Successful strategy for discovery in

particle physics

• Muon, Pion, etc.

• But limited

• Can’t control the energy

• Can’t control rate

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 Controlled Acceleration to High
Energies

• Man-made particle accelerators

• Application of alternating electric fields gives
charged particles a kick
• Use dipole magnets to bend particles in a circle
• Repeatedly accelerate
• Achieve ultra-relativistic velocities
• Use bunched beams of many particles to obtain
high collision rates
• Fixed target or Colliding Beams?

f ixed target
� �
ECM ≈ 2E1 m2 collider
ECM ≈ 4E1 E2
Tuesday, 20 April 2010
 What to Collide?

• Matter on anti-matter is best (annihilation) E = γmc 2

• e+ e- ?
∆Erad
turn
∝ 1
r × (m )
E 4

• Difficult to accelerate e+e- to highest energies due to losses

from synchrotron radiation

mp ≈ 2000 × me
• Okay so ppbar?

• Difficult to make (and store) antiprotons in sufficient quantities

• So the LHC has was chosen to be a pp collider

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 Hadronic Collisions

u u
p p
u d
q q
q q
d u

• Hadrons are composite

x f(x)

x f(x)
1.4 1.4

• Really collide constituent partons

• Valence (u,d) quarks
1.2 1.2

• Sea (virtual) quarks 1 1

• Gluons 0.8 0.8

0.6 0.6

• Momentum fraction carried by parton

given by empirically determined
0.4 0.4

parton distribution functions (PDFs) 0.2 0.2

0 -4 -3 -2 -1
0 -4 -3 -2 -1
10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10
x x

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 Summary of Advantages of Hadron
Machines

• Higher Energies

• Multiple production mechanisms

• Quark-quark, gluon-gluon, quark-gluon

• Broad band of energies available

• With enough collisions can probe regimes significantly higher (and lower)
than average constituent CM energy

• These facts make hadron colliders ideal for exploring the unknown

• Excellent discovery machines

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 Hadron Colliders as Discovery
Machines

• Hadron colliders
have historically
been discovery
machines

• The LHC should be

no different

• Especially since we
expect to see the
SM break down at
the Terascale (why?
we’ll get to that
soon)
W,Z
t

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 The Challenge of Hadron Machines

• Probability for “soft” QCD interactions

many orders of magnitude greater than
hard scattering processes of interest

• Analysis of collision data has added »1012

complications

• No beam energy constraint

• Possibility of more than one

interaction per beam crossing

• Incoming partons may radiate

gluons

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 The Large Hadron Collider

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 A better view (obviously taken while
skiing)

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 CERN Accelerator Complex

• LHC is just the last in a

series of accelerators
needed to get pp collisions
at 14 TeV

• Protons start being

accelerated in a LINAC, then
transferred to ever larger
synchrotrons

• Eventually injected into LHC

where final acceleration to 7
TeV occurs

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 Some LHC facts

• To bend 0.1 electron/

positron beams LEP
magnets were only 0.1 T

• To bend 7 TeV proton

beams, LHC needs 8.3 T

• This means
superconducting
magnets

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 Challenges of the LHC - Magnets

• Superconducting (Nb-Ti)
magnets are expensive

• Must be cooled to 1.9 K

(liquid He)

• To accelerate proton
beams in opposite
directions requires two sets
of magnets (2x the price)

• LHC uses a novel two-in-

one magnet design to
avoid this cost

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 Luminosity

• Once the LHC is completed and commissioned, all the typical experimental
particle physicist will care about is the beam’s instantaneous luminosity

• Linst = 1034 cm-2 s-1 (LHC design goal)

• This is equivalent to 10 nb-1/s

• Particle production is dependent on the cross-section of the physics process

and the integrated luminosity (which has units of inverse barns)
�
N =σ× Ldt

• To observe rare processes (e.g. higgs with fb cross-sections) one needs a lot of
integrated luminosity
• One experimental year = 107 s -> 100 fb-1/year at 1034

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 Beam Parameters that Affect
Luminosity

• n = number of particles in bunch 1,2

f n1 n2
• f = collision frequency
L= �
4 �x βx∗ �y βy∗
• ε = transverse emittance (~size)

• σ = gaussian beam profiles in x,y � = πσ /β 2

• β* = amplitude function (beam optics quantity)

For high luminosity want high populations of bunches at low emittance to

collide at high frequency with magnets focusing to as low beta as possible

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 Plans for LHC Operation (2010-11)

Energy will
be 7 TeV,
no higher

In 2010
Linst will be
(eventually)
1032

In 2011
Linst will get
Expect ~100 pb-1 this year and ~1 fb-1 by end of first run
to 1033
Tuesday, 20 April 2010
 What happened to 14 TeV? Linst =1034?

• Due to the accident of

September 19, 2008
(which caused a delay of 1
year in the LHC startup),
going to energies above 7
TeV has been deemed
unsafe without significant
work on the LHC (requires
warm up of sectors which
costs time)

• 2012 will be spent doing

these repairs

• Will also make

• From 2013 - ???, LHC will (hopefully) finally run at
modifications necessary
sqrt(s) = 14 TeV, with Linst = 1034
for higher lumi

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 Hadron Collider - Basic Kinematics

• Cylindrical geometry of experiments -> cylindrical coordinates (r,phi,theta)

• Phi is azimuthal angle
• Physics is symmetric in phi
• Theta is the polar angle (0 along the beamline)
• The fact that hadronic collisions are not collisions amongst point particles
complicates the kinematics
• Longitudinal (z) momentum is not conserved in the partonic collision
• Momentum is only conserved in the transverse plane
• Transverse quantities are often used in analysis

ET ≡ E sin θ
pT ≡ p sin θ �
mT ≡ m2 + p2x + p2y

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 Hadron Collider - Kinematics (Cont.)

• We usually do not use theta as the polar angle, but rather the pseudo-
rapidity, eta

η ≡ − ln(tan 2)
θ

• Eta is a good approximation to the rapidity, y

E + pz
y ≡ ln(
1
2 )
E − pz
y ≈ η, p � m, θ � 1/γ
dN
• Charged particle production is constant per unit of rapidity ≈7
• Rapidity is invariant under lorentz boosts in z dy
Tuesday, 20 April 2010
 Hadron Collider - Kinematics (Cont.)

• Partons carry only a fraction of the protons’ momenta

pparton
x≡
pproton
• Effective center-of-mass energy usually much less than sqrt(s)
√ √
ŝ = x1 x2 s
• To produce a mass of 100 GeV at LHC requires x ~ 0.007
• To produce a mass of 5 TeV at LHC requires x ~ 0.36

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 Minimum (“Min”) Bias Events

• Vast majority of collisions have

a minimum of triggerable
activity and are
correspondingly called “min
bias” events

• Small momentum transfer

• Final state particles have

large longitudinal, but small
transverse momentum

• <pT> ≈ 500 MeV

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 Why do we expect New Physics at the
LHC?
• Standard Model obviously not a
complete theory

• No description of gravity, 3
generations, mass hierarchy,
etc.

• Requires existence of unobserved

Higgs boson to break electroweak
symmetry (and give mass to the
particles)

• The Higgs field is a scalar field

which causes what is known as the N.B. These (and many other questions
Hierachy Problem about SM) may/may not be addressed by
the LHC but they were not why it was
built

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 Hierarchy Problem
• Can’t the SM be valid up to the scale
where gravity is important?

tree top gauge self

• MPlanck ≈ 1019 GeV m2H ≈ (200 GeV )2 = m2H + δm2H + δm2H + δm2H

• Not easily, even for Much lower energy 4,000,000

scales (Λcutoff ~ 10 TeV) This must balance 3,000,000

2,000,000

Mass2[GeV2]
• Incredible fine-tuning required in loop 1,000,000
corrections to Higgs mass 0
-1,000,000
• δm2H ∝ Λ2cutoff These -2,000,000
-3,000,000
top gauge
-4,000,000
self
tree
actual

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

 Summary

• The LHC will offer us a new view into a region of nature that we have every
reason to suspect holds significant surprises which we hope to discover

• It is a challenging machine, one of the biggest scientific endeavours ever

embarked on

• Nevertheless, it has been working very well in 2009, and 2010.

• About 100 µb-1 so far -- more every day (106 more by end of 2010, 109
more, 1 fb-1, by end of 2011)

• Next lecture, we’ll talk about the detectors with which we’ll be observing these
7 TeV collisions ...

Tuesday, 20 April 2010