Speaker
Description
A huge amount of effort and person-power goes into searching for evidence of beyond-the-SM (BSM) theories at the LHC. A search may take a large team over a year to produce, and even then may only focus on the model’s most spectacular signature. But many BSM theories would probably already have been ruled out, because they would have caused measurable distortions to well-understood spectra of “standard” processes. If one could quickly check how a signal would have manifested itself in the myriad of LHC measurements to date, a huge amount of person-power could be liberated to focus instead on the remaining models which are not already ruled out. CONTUR is a tool which uses Herwig to generate events all 2->2 processes for a given BSM model, and runs the events through the bank of >150 LHC measurements which are preserved in Rivet+HEPdata, to very quickly gauge which parts of a model’s parameter space is already ruled out. In this talk, I will give an overview of this powerful new approach. I will then highlight the results from a recent CONTUR paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.07172), where we use this method to tackle a whole class of “Vector-like Quark” models, and show complementary results to the direct search program.
