| Date | Notes |
| Wednesday 8/21 | No class: KM out of town. |
| Friday 8/23 | Introductions, course and career objectives. |
| Monday 8/26 | Course policies, course web page. Using the arXiv. Using spires. |
| Wednesday 8/28 | Handout from the 2004 course at Cornell. MC4BSM workshop series. The writeup of the computer tutorials at Cornell. |
| Friday 8/30 | Introduction to latex. To set up your latex environment, follow these instructions. The template discussed in class is located here. More about latex. Referencing: using bibtex or thebibliography. Introduction to Axodraw. See also jaxodraw. Figures and plots. An overview of collider phenomenology. |
| Monday 9/2 | Labor Day |
| Wednesday 9/4 | Overview of available tools. The principle of Monte Carlo integration. |
| Friday 9/6 | Overview of CalcHEP. KC Kong's TASI webpage |
| Monday 9/9 | Continue overview of CalcHEP. |
| Wednesday 9/11 | Calculating a decay rate and branching fractions with CalcHEP. |
| Friday 9/13 | Continue overview of CalcHEP. Decays and branching fractions of the Z boson. Kinematic distributions in 2-body decays. |
| Monday 9/16 | Continue overview of CalcHEP. Top quark decay. Kinematic distributions in 3-body decays. Setting up the initial state for cross-section calculations. |
| Wednesday 9/18 | Calculating cross-sections with CalcHEP and plotting distributions. Using Regularization for faster convergence. |
| Friday 9/20 | Simulating events at hadron colliders: parton level, fragmentation and hadronization, underlying event. Classification of reconstructed objects: electrons, muons, photons, jets, missing transverse momentum. Higgs production processes at LHC and Tevatron. |
| Monday 9/23 | Special lecture: The Inevitability of Physical Laws: Why the Higgs Has to Exist |
| Wednesday 9/25 | Brief introduction to Madgraph |
| Friday 9/27 | Implementing a new model in CalcHEP: Z'. Implementing a user function in CalcHEP. Brief overview of CompHEP. Distinguishing signal from background. Cuts. Object reconstruction in a particle physics detector. |
| Monday 9/30 | Basic hadron collider kinematics. Reading: Section III and IV of Tao Han's TASI-04 lecture notes. |
| Wednesday 10/2 | Rapidity and pseudorapidity. |
| Friday 10/4 | Transverse momentum distribution of the leptons in W/Z decay. Jacobian peak. |
| Monday 10/7 | Transverse W mass. Dependence on the test invisible mass. |
| Wednesday 10/9 |
Methods for measuring the masses of semi-invisibly decaying particles arXiv:1004.2732. SUSY mass measurements in a long decay chain arXiv:0903.4371. Transverse projections arXiv:1105.2977. |
| Friday 10/11 |
MT2 variable hep-ph/9906349. The MT2 "kink" arXiv:0709.0288. Subsystem MT2 arXiv:0810.5576. |
| Monday 10/14 |
MT2 in asymmetric cases arXiv:0911.4126. MT2 crease arXiv:0908.3779. MCT variable arXiv:0802.2879. Decomposition within the transverse plane arXiv:0910.1584. MT2perp and MT2 parallel arXiv:0910.3679. |
| Wednesday 10/16 |
Meff variable hep-ph/0006276. MT2 as a cut arXiv:0907.2713. Smin variable arXiv:0812.1042. Subsystem Smin variable arXiv:1006.0653. The 3+1 dimensional analogues of MT2 arXiv:1212.1720 |
| Friday 10/18 |
How to do a new physics search.
Example: Higgs searches at the LHC.
Cross-sections and branching fractions.
LHC Higgs Cross Section Working Group.
Introduction to PYTHIA.
The files which you need can be found here.
PYTHIA installation and running our first example.
More fun with PYTHIA. Understanding the event output.
Making plots. Reading the manual. Discussion of the homework: fourth generation.
Turning on and off decay modes in pythia.
Matrix elements versus parton showers.
Detector simulation. The PYCELL routine in PYTHIA.
Extracting analytical results from CalcHEP and CompHEP.
Example: e+e- -> mu+mu-. Implementing a higher-dimensional operator in CalcHEP. One-loop mediated Higgs couplings. Radiative correction to the Higgs mass. Hierarchy problem. |
| Monday 10/21 | CalcHEP-PYTHIA interface: generating events in CalcHEP and feeding them into PYTHIA. |
| Wednesday 10/23 | Measuring the mass of a semi-invisibly decaying resonance. Transverse mass. Example: W->lepton+neutrino. |
| Friday 10/25 | Mass measurements for pair-produced semi-invisibly decaying resonances. I. Long decay chains: invariant mass edges. |
| Monday 10/28 | Combinatorics problem. Opposite flavor subtraction. Mixed event subtraction. II. Short decay chains: The Cambridge M_T2 variable. Example: 2-step decay chain. Subsystem MT2. |
| Wednesday 10/30 | Applications of MT and MT2 to event topologies with upstream momentum. Mass measurements from the MT2max kink. Doubly transverse projection: MT2perp. |
| Friday 11/1 | (KM out of town). Guest lecturer: Prof. Rick Field, Simulation of the underlying event in PYTHIA. |
| Monday 11/4 | (KM out of town). Guest lecturer: Dr. Wonsang Cho, MT2 tutorial. The MT2 kink and MAOS reconstruction. |
| Monday 11/6 | Discovering new physics in multijet events. The alpha_T variable. The S_min variable. |
| Friday 11/8 | Homecoming |
| Monday 11/11 | Veterans Day |
| Wednesday 11/13 | A general introduction to minimized invariant mass variables can be found here. Connection between MT2 and Smin. Slepton decay topology and momentum distributions. The razor variable. |
| Friday 11/15 | Micromegas tutorial. |
| Monday 11/18 | Implementing a new model in Micromegas: instructions. A model with a DM singlet. |
| Wednesday 11/20 | Guest lecturer: Prof. Tarek Saab. Direct dark matter detection: part I and part II. (NB: large files!) |
| Friday 11/22 | Indirect dark matter detection. General discussion. Teaching evaluations. |
| Monday 11/25 | Open date. |
| Wednesday 11/27 | Thanksgiving |
| Friday 11/29 | Thanksgiving |
| Monday 12/02 | Presentations of final projects. |
| Wednesday 12/04 | Presentations of final projects. |