Berkeley Workshop on Physics Opportunities with Early LHC Data

In 2009/2010 we expect to see the first LHC collision data and this workshop is held to maximize the physics potential of this first LHC run. Current estimates for the 2009/2010 run are that the center-of-mass energy will be 10 TeV and that the integrated luminosity will be about 200 pb-1. This has been announced recently by CERN following the meeting held in Chamonix early February.

While exhaustive and detailed studies of the LHC physics potential exist with high luminosity (>10 fb-1) at 14 TeV, there are relatively few studies at lower energy with low luminosity. Even though the energy is slightly lower than the design it may be very interesting to make measurements at this lower energy which is still a factor of 5 larger than ever observed in a controlled environment! In fact it may be particularly interesting to measure something at 10 TeV as this may never be done again when the LHC runs at full steam. This workshop therefore aims at exploring the physics that might be possible with such a data sample and particularly is aimed at PhD students who wish to graduate on the 2009/2010 data. Since the integrated luminosity is still rather uncertain (both in terms of how much will be delivered by LHC and also how much good data will be acquired for physics analysis by the experiments) we will survey opportunities for any luminosities between 1 pb-1 and 200 pb-1 For theorists this presents the great opportunity to inspire those students to measure some peoperty that may otherwise not get measured.

The topics covered by this workshop are

    * soft QCD: total cross-section, underlying event, diffraction,...
    * hard QCD: jet production, jet properties, photon cross section(s), ...
    * Heavy-Flavor production: J/Psi and Upsilon, open charm and bottom, ...
    * Elecroweak Physics: W/Z production
    * New Physics: large new physics cross section with spectacular (detectable) signatures