Prof. Gavin Salam FRS

Abstract:

It is widely considered that, for Higgs boson searches at the CERN Large Hadron Colider, WH and ZH production where the Higgs boson decays to bb are poor search channels due to large backgrounds. We show that at high transverse momenta, employing state-of-the-art jet reconstruction and decomposition techniques, these processes can be recovered as promising search channels for the standard model Higgs boson around 120 GeV in mass.

Abstract:

Inspired by the success of analytical models for non-perturbative effects, used to investigate event shape variables at LEP and HERA, we apply them to a study of jets at hadron colliders such as the Tevatron and the LHC. We find that simple analytical estimates are able to shed considerable light on issues that could previously be tackled only through Monte-Carlo simulations, for example the role of different non-perturbative effects in various jet algorithms. In this context, we also provide testable numerical results for the commonly studied inclusive-jet $p_t$ distribution, and we introduce new observables that could be employed to verify our calculations.