Particle theory

Abstract:

During the past two decades, experiments in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres have observed a small but measurable energy-dependent sidereal anisotropy in the arrival direction distribution of galactic cosmic rays. The relative amplitude of the anisotropy is 10-4 -10-3. However, each of these individual measurements is restricted by limited sky coverage, and so the pseudo-power spectrum of the anisotropy obtained from any one measurement displays a systematic correlation between different multipole modes C. To address this issue, we present the preliminary status of a joint analysis of the anisotropy on all angular scales using cosmic-ray data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory located at the South Pole (90 S) and the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory located at Sierra Negra, Mexico (19 N). We describe the methods used to combine the IceCube and HAWC data, address the individual detector systematics and study the region of overlapping field of view between the two observatories.

Abstract:

© 2015, The Author(s). Dark matter which is bound in the Galactic halo might self-annihilate and produce a flux of stable final state particles, e.g. high energy neutrinos. These neutrinos can be detected with IceCube, a cubic-kilometer sized Cherenkov detector. Given IceCube’s large field of view, a characteristic anisotropy of the additional neutrino flux is expected. In this paper we describe a multipole method to search for such a large-scale anisotropy in IceCube data. This method uses the expansion coefficients of a multipole expansion of neutrino arrival directions and incorporates signal-specific weights for each expansion coefficient. We apply the technique to a high-purity muon neutrino sample from the Northern Hemisphere. The final result is compatible with the null-hypothesis. As no signal was observed, we present limits on the self-annihilation cross-section averaged over the relative velocity distribution (Formula Presented.) down to ([Formula Presented.) for a dark matter particle mass of 700–1,000 GeV and direct annihilation into (Formula Presented.). The resulting exclusion limits come close to exclusion limits from γ-ray experiments, that focus on the outer Galactic halo, for high dark matter masses of a few TeV and hard annihilation channels.

Abstract:

To fully profit from the remarkable achievements of the experimental program at the LHC, very precise theoretical predictions for signal and background processes are required. In this contribution, I will review some of the recent progress in fully exclusive next-to-next-to-leading-order (NNLO) QCD computations. As an example of the phenomenological relevance of these results, I will present LHC predictions for t−channel single-top production and Higgs boson production in association with one hard jet.