We study the phenomenology of a Z-boson field coupled to hypercharge. The Z propagator has a non-trivial Kallen-Lehmann spectral density due to the mixing with a higher dimensional inert vector field. As a consequence detection possibilities at hadron colliders are reduced. We determine the range of parameters where this field can be studied at the Tevatron and the LHC through its production cross section via the Drell-Yan mechanism.
This is a personal recollection of several results involving the phenomenological study of the multi-Regge limit of scattering amplitudes. None of them would have been possible without the encouragement and constant support from Lev Nikolaevich Lipatov.
Theories with extra dimensions of inverse TeV size (or larger) predict a multitude of signals which can be searched for at present and future colliders. In this paper, we review the different phenomenological signatures of a particular class of models, universal extra dimensions, where all matter fields propagate in the bulk. Such models have interesting features, in particular Kaluza-Klein (KK) number conservation, which makes their phenomenology similar to that of supersymmetric theories. Thus, KK excitations of matter are produced in pairs, and decay to a lightest KK particle (LKP), which is stable and weakly interacting, and therefore will appear as missing energy in the detector (similar to a neutralino LSP). Adding gravitational interactions which can break KK number conservation greatly expands the class of possible signatures. Thus, if gravity is the primary cause for the decay of KK excitations of matter, the experimental signals at hadron colliders will be jets + missing energy, which is typical of supergravity models. If the KK quarks and gluons decay first to the LKP, which then decays gravitationally, the experimental signal will be photons and/or leptons (with some jets), which resembles the phenomenology of gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking models.
We report on the first computation of the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD corrections to $W^{pm}Z$ production in proton collisions. We consider both the inclusive production of on-shell $W^{pm}Z$ pairs at LHC energies and the total $W^{pm}Z$ rates including off-shell effects of the $W$ and $Z$ bosons. In the off-shell computation, the invariant mass of the lepton pairs from the $Z$ boson decay is required to be in a given mass window, and the results are compared with the corresponding measurements obtained by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations. The NNLO corrections range from 8% at $sqrt{s}$=7 TeV to 11% at $sqrt{s}$=14 TeV and significantly improve the agreement with the LHC data at $sqrt{s}$=7 and 8 TeV.
A general review of the latest results about single and double vector boson production in the multipurpose experiments at LHC (ATLAS and CMS) and at Tevatron (CDF and D0) will be presented. The review will focus on boson production, while a more detailed report about W and Z properties can be found elsewhere. Only leptonic decays into electrons and muons will be considered.
In hadronic collisions at high energies, the top-quark may be treated as a parton inside a hadron. Top-quark initiated processes become increasingly important since the top-quark luminosity can reach a few percent of the bottom-quark luminosity. In the production of a heavy particle $H$ with mass $m_H > m_t$, treating the top-quark as a parton allows us to resum large logarithms $log(m_{H}^{2}/m_{t}^{2}$) arising from collinear splitting in the initial state. We quantify the effect of collinear resummation at the 14-TeV LHC and a future 100-TeV hadron collider, focusing on the top-quark open-flavor process $ggto tbar t H$ in comparison with $tbar t to H$ and $tgrightarrow tH$ at the leading order (LO) in QCD. We employ top-quark parton distribution functions with appropriate collinear subtraction and power counting. We find that (1) Collinear resummation enhances the inclusive production of a heavy particle with $m_Happrox$ 5 TeV (0.5 TeV) by more than a factor of two compared to the open-flavor process at a 100-TeV (14-TeV) collider; (2) Top-quark mass effects are important for scales $m_H$ near the top-quark threshold, where the cross section is largest. We advocate a modification of the ACOT factorization scheme, dubbed m-ACOT, to consistently treat heavy-quark masses in hadronic collisions; (3) The scale uncertainty of the total cross section in m-ACOT is of about 20 percent at the LO. While a higher-order calculation is indispensable for a precise prediction, the LO cross section is well described by the process $tbar tto H$ using an effective factorization scale significantly lower than $m_H$. We illustrate our results by the example of a heavy spin-0 particle. Our main results also apply to the production of particles with spin-1 and 2.