This report summarizes the work of the Energy Frontier New Physics working group of the 2013 Community Summer Study (Snowmass).
Snowmass is a US long-term planning study for the high-energy community by the American Physical Societys Division of Particles and Fields. For its simulation studies, opportunistic resources are harnessed using the Open Science Grid infrastructure.
Late binding grid technology, GlideinWMS, was used for distributed scheduling of the simulation jobs across many sites mainly in the US. The pilot infrastructure also uses the Parrot mechanism to dynamically access CvmFS in order to ascertain a homogeneous environment across the nodes. This report presents the resource usage and the storage model used for simulating large statistics Standard Model backgrounds needed for Snowmass Energy Frontier studies.
As the heaviest known fundamental particle, the top quark has taken a central role in the study of fundamental interactions. Production of top quarks in pairs provides an important probe of strong interactions. The top quark mass is a key fundamental
parameter which places a valuable constraint on the Higgs boson mass and electroweak symmetry breaking. Observations of the relative rates and kinematics of top quark final states constrain potential new physics. In many cases, the tests available with study of the top quark are both critical and unique. Large increases in data samples from the Fermilab Tevatron have been coupled with major improvements in experimental techniques to produce many new precision measurements of the top quark. The first direct evidence for electroweak production of top quarks has been obtained, with a resulting direct determination of $V_{tb}$. Several of the properties of the top quark have been measured. Progress has also been made in obtaining improved limits on potential anomalous production and decay mechanisms. This review presents an overview of recent theoretical and experimental developments in this field. We also provide a brief discussion of the implications for further efforts.
