We further develop the constrained mass variable techniques to determine the mass scale of invisible particles pair-produced at hadron colliders. We introduce the constrained mass variable M_3C which provides an event-by-event lower bound and upper bound to the mass scale given the two mass differences between the lightest three new particle states. This variable is most appropriate for short symmetric cascade decays involving two-body decays and on-shell intermediate states which end in standard-model particles and two dark-matter particles. An important feature of the constrained mass variables is that they do not rely simply on the position of the end point but use the additional information contained in events which lie far from the end point. To demonstrate our method we study the supersymmetric model SPS 1a. We select cuts to study events with two Neutralino_2 each of which decays to Neutralino_1, and two opposite-sign same-flavor (OSSF) charged leptons through an intermediate on-shell slepton. We find that with 300 fb^-1 of integrated luminosity the invisible-particle mass can be measured to M=96.4 +/- 2.4 GeV. Combining fits to the shape of the M_3C constrained mass variable distribution with the max m_ll edge fixes the mass differences to +/- 0.2 GeV.
We develop techniques to determine the mass scale of invisible particles pair-produced at hadron colliders. We employ the constrained mass variable m_2C, which provides an event-by-event lower-bound to the mass scale given a mass difference. We complement this variable with a new variable m_2C,UB which provides an additional upper bound to the mass scale, and demonstrate its utility with a realistic case study of a supersymmetry model. These variables together effectively quantify the `kink in the function Max m_T2 which has been proposed as a mass-determination technique for collider-produced dark matter. An important advantage of the m_2C method is that it does not rely simply on the position at the endpoint, but it uses the additional information contained in events which lie far from the endpoint. We found the mass by comparing the HERWIG generated m_2C distribution to ideal distributions for different masses. We find that for the case studied, with 100 fb^-1 of integrated luminosity (about 400 signal events), the invisible particles mass can be measured to a precision of 4.1 GeV. We conclude that this techniques precision and accuracy is as good as, if not better than, the best known techniques for invisible-particle mass-determination at hadron colliders.
In case of the discovery of supersymmetry at the LHC, the goal will be to identify the underlying theory, its fundamental parameters, and the masses of SUSY particles. We followed here the approach to reconstruct the decay chains in SUSY events under the assumption of common intermediate masses. These masses cannot be extracted from each event because of the unmeasured LSP momenta in case of R-parity conservation. But an ensemble of events can be over-constrained, if the decay chains are long enough, such that enough mass constraints are available. Here, we present a new method combining a) a SUSY mass scan, b) a kinematic fitting based on a genetic algorithm for decay chain reconstruction, and c) the usage of angular decay information to suppress the background from other SUSY processes. Taking into account the full combinatorial background and experimental resolutions in the most difficult case of the fully hadronic decay mode, we demonstrate, within one SUSY scenario, that this method can be used to derive a probability map of the SUSY parameter space.
Establishing that a signal of new physics is undoubtly supersymmetric requires not only the discovery of the supersymmetric partners but also probing their spins and couplings. We show that the sbottom spin can be probed at the CERN Large Hadron Collider using only angular correlations in sbottom pair production with subsequent decay of sbottoms into bottom quark plus the lightest neutralino, which allow us to distinguish a universal extra dimensional interpretation with a fermionic heavy bottom quark from supersymmetry with a bosonic bottom squark. We demonstrate that this channel provides a clear indication of the sbottom spin provided the sbottom production rate and branching ratio into bottom quark plus the lightest neutralino are sufficiently large to have a clear signal above Standard Model backgrounds.
We investigate the significance of thermal dilepton radiation in the intermediate-mass region in heavy-ion reactions at CERN-SpS energies. Within a thermal fireball model for the space-time evolution, the radiation from hot matter is found to dominate over hard background processes (Drell-Yan and open charm) up to invariant masses of about 2 GeV, with a rather moderate fraction emerging from early stages with temperatures $Tsimeq 175-200$ MeV associated with deconfined matter. Further including a schematic acceptance for the NA50 experiment we find good agreement with the observed enhancement in the region 1.5 GeV~$<M_{mumu}<$~3 GeV. In particular, there is no need to invoke any anomalous open charm enhancement.
We improve the theoretical predictions for the production of extra neutral gauge bosons at hadron colliders by implementing the Z bosons in the MC@NLO generator and by computing their differential and total cross sections in joint p_T and threshold resummation. The two improved predictions are found to be in excellent agreement with each other for mass spectra, p_T spectra, and total cross sections, while the PYTHIA parton and ``power shower predictions usually employed for experimental analyses show significant shortcomings both in normalization and shape. The theoretical uncertainties from scale and parton density variations and non-perturbative effects are found to be 9%, 8%, and less than 5%, respectively, and thus under good control. The implementation of our improved predictions in terms of the new MC@NLO generator or resummed K factors in the analysis chains of the Tevatron and LHC experiments should be straightforward and lead to more precise determinations or limits of the Z boson masses and/or couplings.