Seminars and Journal Clubs

The case for direct searches at LHCb

by Dr Martino Borsato (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela)

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

E/3rd floor-E.349 - Seminar room (E.349)

Marc de Hemptinne (chemin du Cyclotron, 2, Louvain-la-Neuve)

30
Description

The LHCb experiment at the LHC is being extremely successful in its program of precise flavour physics, pushing it well beyond expectations. By triggering on low transverse momentum objects and by identifying displaced vertices online, LHCb can efficiently select soft hadron decays in the forward region of the LHC. These are used to probe physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) indirectly up to very high masses. Direct searches for high mass states is instead the realm of LHC general purpose detectors, ATLAS and CMS, which have a much larger angular coverage and run at higher luminosity. In the absence of evidence for new particles at the TeV scale, LHC physicists are reconsidering lighter states that might have been missed because of small cross-sections or long lifetimes. 
In this seminar I will discuss how LHCb has recently probed to be very competitive in identifying this kind of signatures and how its program of searches is rapidly expanding. I will also comment on the opportunities offered by future upgrades of the detector and in particular of by the deployment of a novel trigger system completely based on software.