No Arabic abstract
We study the impact of including quark- and gluon-initiated jet discrimination in the search for strongly interacting supersymmetric particles at the LHC. Taking the example of gluino pair production, considerable improvement is observed in the LHC search reach on including the jet substructure observables to the standard kinematic variables within a multivariate analysis. In particular, quark and gluon jet separation has higher impact in the region of intermediate mass-gap between the gluino and the lightest neutralino, as the difference between the signal and the standard model background kinematic distributions is reduced in this region. We also compare the predictions from different Monte Carlo event generators to estimate the uncertainty originating from the modelling of the parton shower and hadronization processes.
We perform a threshold resummation calculation for the associated production of gluinos and gauginos at the LHC to the next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. Analytical results are presented for the process-dependent soft anomalous dimension and the hard function. The resummed results are matched to a full next-to-leading order calculation, for which we have generalised the previously known results to the case of supersymmetric scenarios featuring non-universal squark masses. Numerically, the next-to-leading logarithmic contributions increase the total next-to-leading order cross section by 7 to 20% for central scale choices and gluino masses of 3 to 6 TeV, respectively, and reduce its scale dependence typically from up to $pm12$% to below $pm3$%.
In this work, we investigate the prompt $J/psi$ production in associated with top quark pair to leading order in the nonrelativistic QCD factorization formalism at the LHC with $sqrt{s} =13$ TeV. In addition to the contribution from direct $J/psi$ production, we also include the indirect contribution from the directly produced heavier charmmonia $chi_{cJ}$ and $psi^prime$. We present the numerical results for the total and differential cross sections and find that the $sideset{^3}{^{(8)}_1}{mathop{{S}}}$ states give the dominant contributions. The prompt $tbar t J/psi$ signatures at the LHC are analyzed in the tetralepton channel $ppto (tto W^+(ell^+ u)b) (bar t to W^-(ell^- bar u)bar b) (J/psitomu^+mu^-)$ and trilepton channel $ppto (tto W(q q^prime)b) ( t to W(ell u) b) (J/psitomu^+mu^-)$, with the $J/psi$ mesons decaying into muon pair, and the top quarks decaying leptonically or hadronically. We find that $tbar t J/psi$ proudction can be potentially detected at the LHC, whose measurement is useful to test the heavy quarkonium production mechanism.
We study the relevance of experimental data on heavy-flavor [$D^0$, $J/psi$, $Brightarrow J/psi$ and $Upsilon(1S)$ mesons] production in proton-lead collisions at the LHC to improve our knowledge of the gluon-momentum distribution inside heavy nuclei. We observe that the nuclear effects encoded in both most recent global fits of nuclear parton densities at next-to-leading order (nCTEQ15 and EPPS16) provide a good overall description of the LHC data. We interpret this as a hint that these are the dominant ones. In turn, we perform a Bayesian-reweighting analysis for each particle data sample which shows that each of the existing heavy-quark(onium) data set clearly points --with a minimal statistical significance of 7 $sigma$-- to a shadowed gluon distribution at small $x$ in the lead. Moreover, our analysis corroborates the existence of gluon antishadowing. Overall, the inclusion of such heavy-flavor data in a global fit would significantly reduce the uncertainty on the gluon density down to $xsimeq 7times 10^{-6}$ --where no other data exist-- while keeping an agreement with the other data of the global fits. Our study accounts for the factorization-scale uncertainties which dominate for the charm(onium) sector.
Pair production of W bosons constitutes an important background to Higgs boson and new physics searches at the Large Hadron Collider LHC. We have calculated the loop-induced gluon-fusion process gg -> W*W* -> leptons, including intermediate light and heavy quarks and allowing for arbitrary invariant masses of the W bosons. While formally of next-to-next-to-leading order, the gg -> W*W* -> leptons process is enhanced by the large gluon flux at the LHC and by experimental Higgs search cuts, and increases the next-to-leading order WW background estimate for Higgs searches by about 30%. We have extended our previous calculation to include the contribution from the intermediate top-bottom massive quark loop and the Higgs signal process. We provide updated results for cross sections and differential distributions and study the interference between the different gluon scattering contributions. We describe important analytical and numerical aspects of our calculation and present the public GG2WW event generator.
We present predictions of the total cross sections for pair production of squarks and gluinos at the LHC, including the stop-antistop production process. Our calculation supplements full fixed-order NLO predictions with resummation of threshold logarithms and Coulomb singularities at next-to-leading logarithmic (NLL) accuracy, including bound-state effects. The numerical effect of higher-order Coulomb terms can be as big or larger than that of soft-gluon corrections. For a selection of benchmark points accessible with data from the 2010-2012 LHC runs, resummation leads to an enhancement of the total inclusive squark and gluino production cross section in the 15-30 % range. For individual production processes of gluinos, the corrections can be much larger. The theoretical uncertainty in the prediction of the hard-scattering cross sections is typically reduced to the 10 % level.