Particle theory

Abstract:

We present a new model of the diffuse Galactic synchrotron radiation, concentrating on its angular anisotropies. While previous studies have focussed on either the variation of the emissivity on large (kpc) scales, or on fluctuations due to MHD turbulence in the interstellar medium, we unify these approaches to match the angular power spectrum. We note that the usual turbulence cascade calculation ignores spatial correlations at the injection scale due to compression of the interstellar medium by old supernova remnants -- the 'radio loops', only four of which are visible by eye in radio maps. This new component naturally provides the otherwise missing power on intermediate and small scales in the all-sky map at 408 MHz. Our model can enable more reliable subtraction of the synchrotron foreground for studies of CMB anisotropies (both in temperature and polarisation) or searches for dark matter annihilation. We conclude with some remarks on the relevance to modelling of the polarised foreground.

Abstract:

Jets in high energy hadronic collisions often contain the fingerprints of the particles that produced them. Those fingerprints, and thus the nature of the particles that produced the jets, can be read off with the help of quantities known as jet shapes. Jet shapes are, however, severely affected by pileup, the accumulation in the detector of the residues of the many simultaneous collisions taking place in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We introduce a method to correct for pileup effects in jet shapes. Relative to earlier, limited approaches, the key advance resides in its full generality, achieved through a numerical determination, for each jet, of a given shape's susceptibility to pileup. The method rescues the possibility of using jet shapes in the high pileup environment of current and future LHC running, as we show with examples of quark-gluon discrimination and top tagging.