LHC: New Physics and Heavy Flavours

The standard model of particle physics which was proposed in essence about thirty years ago has been successfully confirmed in many experiments. One particle, the Higgs boson, which endows the other fundamental particles with mass remains to be discovered. Besides that there are many reasons to believe that there is more to be discovered than just the Higgs boson. There are astrophysical observations which show that the the standard model is not complete from rotation curves of galaxies for instance and the mass of the Higgs boson is unstable. Moreover the asymmetry between matter and antimatter entailed in the standard model is not sufficient to explain the actual dominance by matter over antimatter in the universe. Therefore a majority of physicists believe that at smaller scales some new physical theory will emerge. This will be tested in an immense scientific experiment at CERN in Geneva called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which probes distances at the orders of magnitudes smaller than atomic sizes. The matter antimatter symmetry will also be tested in an important side experiment called LHCb which is designed to investigate the decays of certain bound states made out of the beauty quark flavour which could reveal important information about the microscopic mechanism of matter antimatter asymmetry. (Quarks are subnuclear particles which make up the proton for instance and come in the six flavours of up, down, strange, charm, beauty and top.) During the five years of my fellowship at Edinburgh I will be working in two main directions. First I will calculate processes in the standard model for the LHCb experiment to a accurately. This is absolutely crucial since a measurement at CERN can only be compared to the standard model if the results of the latter can be derived from the theory to a certain accuracy. The agreement or disagreement of theory and experiment will decide whether there is something beyond the standard model. During my research career I have developed techniques to describe a channel which is very susceptible to signs of new physics. In so doing I use the fact that the decay can either be described in terms of the so far fundamental quarks or the bound states made out the quarks. There is a total of fifteen members of the LHCb collaboration at Edinburgh which will allow for mutual exchanges of information and collaboration on projects. In fact I am already involved in projects with members of the Edinburgh LHCb group. Second I will investigate models which are beyond the standard model and therefore possible candidates for the description of physics at distance scales that will be probed at the LHC and LHCb at CERN. In the recent past I have worked on two types of models. One of them is called 'unparticles' and borrows ideas from solid state physics and leads to spectacular signatures unfamiliar to particle physicists, hence the name 'unparticles'. The model is not yet very well understood, the results are merely derived from symmetries, a more concrete models remains to be constructed which can be refuted by experiment. To my knowledge there are two models which expose similar behaviour and I will take them as a starting point for constructing a model. The other one is called the Lee-Wick standard model and associates a mirror particle to each standard model particle. Strictly speaking those new particles are not really particles in that they would contribute with negative probabilities. They are to be thought of as effective degrees of freedom which derive from some theory with objects of finite extension such as String Theory. The virtue of this model is that it stabilises the mass of the Higgs boson, in a similar way as supersymmetric extension of the standard model do. It is my goal to work out characteristic signals of this model in order to make it distinguishable from other models at the LHC.