TRISEP Summer School Lectures

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TRISEP Summer School Lectures

I'm up in Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, giving three hours of lectures on "Beyond the Standard Model physics and the LHC" for the TRISEP Summer School.

TRISEP this year is mostly experimental grad students, and mostly experimental grad students working on experiments in the underground labs (such as SNOLAB in Sudbury). I'm the only lecturer who's talking about Beyond the Standard Model physics in general (though specific topics like dark matter and neutrino physics are being covered in more detail by other lecturers), and the only one talking about the LHC. Given that, and the audience, I ended up giving a broad overview: first on the sort of things we theorists have reason to think must exist beyond the Standard Model, then how the LHC works (always entertaining to have a theorist speak on how experiments work), and then lastly on how we look for new physics at the LHC. The slides are below.

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Paper Explainer: Precision Corrections to Fine Tuning in SUSY

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Paper Explainer: Precision Corrections to Fine Tuning in SUSY

This paper is part of a pair with the paper I wrote about here. We were interested in determining how constrained a particular theoretical extension of the Standard Model, supersymmetry (or "SUSY") is by the present experimental results (as of this last summer's ICHEP meeting). The previous paper was the "phenomenology" paper: we took the experimental results, reinterpreted them in the context of a number of interesting models, and calculated the amount of "tuning" that would be present in each model.

The paper we just put out is more of the "theory" paper, the paper that outlines how we did the tuning calculations we used in the phenomenology paper. The results are somewhat technical, so I will spend a bit more time describing the problem in general, and then talk in broad terms about what this paper adds to the discussion. So first I should describe a bit what we mean by "tuning," and why theoretical physicists care so much about it.

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Paper Explainer: Cornering Natural SUSY at LHC Run II and Beyond

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Paper Explainer: Cornering Natural SUSY at LHC Run II and Beyond

This is a blog post on my most recent paper, written with my fellow Rutgers professor David Shih, a Rutgers NHETC postdoc Angelo Monteux, and two Rutgers theory grad students: David Feld (my student) and Sebastian Macaluso (David’s student). It was a pretty big project, as the large (for a theory paper) author list indicates, and in fact the end result was split into two papers for publication, with the 2nd paper coming along shortly. 

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