Invited Seminar - David-Lopez Val - NLO calculations & automated tools for new physics searches

Wednesday 26 Sept 2012, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Brussels

E/3rd floor-E.349 - Seminar room (E.349) (Marc de Hemptinne (chemin du Cyclotron, 2, Louvain-la-Neuve))

With the LHC close to complete its 8 TeV run, TeV-scale new physics is already undergoing an intense experimental scrutiny. In these enterprise, a most pressing request to particle phenomenologists is to develope automated tools that give a fast and flexible access to next-to-leading order (NLO) predictions for the major new physics discovery channels. MadGolem is an example of such an automated tool. It is conceived as an independent add-on to MadGraph/MadEvent and automates the calculation of NLO cross sections and distributions for generic heavy particle pair production beyond the Standard Model (BSM). In this talk we will expand on both the physical and technical otivations for automating NLO calculations. We will review the different steps involved in the calculation of a NLO cross section, and will present how these are carried out and implemented in MadGolem. We will briefly describe the internal architecture of the code and the user's interface, illustrating how the tool performs in practice. Finally, we will discuss sample applications to BSM LHC phenomenology.

Slides lopezval-ucl.pdf