Dawn Of The Lhc Era The Tasi 2008 Proceedings Of The 2008 Theoretical Advanced Study Institute In Elementary Particle Physics

This book contains material from the lecture courses conducted at the Theoretical Advanced Study Institute (TASI, Colorado, USA) on high energy physics and cosmology in 2008. Three series of lectures are presented in parallel in the areas of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) phenomenology and experimentation; advanced theoretical topics beyond the standard model; and neutrino oscillation, astroparticle physics and cosmology. The phenomenology lectures cover a broad spectrum of standard research techniques used to interpret present-day and LHC data. The new physics lectures focus on modern speculations about physics beyond the standard model, with an emphasis on supersymmetry, grand unification theories, extra-dimensional theories, and string phenomenology, which may be tested at the LHC. The lecture series on neutrino physics, astroparticle physics and cosmology treats recent developments in neutrino oscillations, theories and searches of dark matter and dark energy, cosmic microwave background radiation, and density perturbation theory. The lectures are of pedagogical nature in presentation, and are accessible to advanced graduate students and researchers in high energy physics and cosmology.

This book contains material from the lecture courses conducted at the Theoretical Advanced Study Institute (TASI, Colorado, USA) on high energy physics and cosmology in 2008. Three series of lectures are presented in parallel in the areas of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) phenomenology and experimentation; advanced theoretical topics beyond the standard model; and neutrino oscillation, astroparticle physics and cosmology. The phenomenology lectures cover a broad spectrum of standard research techniques used to interpret present-day and LHC data. The new physics lectures focus on modern speculations about physics beyond the standard model, with an emphasis on supersymmetry, grand unification theories, extra-dimensional theories, and string phenomenology, which may be tested at the LHC. The lecture series on neutrino physics, astroparticle physics and cosmology treats recent developments in neutrino oscillations, theories and searches of dark matter and dark energy, cosmic microwave background radiation, and density perturbation theory. The lectures are of pedagogical nature in presentation, and are accessible to advanced graduate students and researchers in high energy physics and cosmology.

This volume is a compilation of the lectures at TASI 2011, held in Boulder, Colorado, June 2011. They cover topics in theoretical particle physics including the Standard Model and beyond, collider physics, dark matter, and cosmology, at a level intended to be accessible to students at the initial stages of their research careers.

This volume is a compilation of lectures delivered at the TASI 2016 summer school, 'Anticipating the Next Discoveries in Particle Physics', held at the University of Colorado at Boulder in June 2016. The school focused on topics in theoretical particle physics, phenomenology, dark matter, and cosmology of interest to contemporary researchers in these fields. The lectures are accessible to graduate students in the initial stages of their research careers.

This book discusses searches for Dark Matter at the CERN’s LHC, the world’s most powerful accelerator. It introduces the relevant theoretical framework and includes an in-depth discussion of the Effective Field Theory approach to Dark Matter production and its validity, as well as an overview of the formalism of Simplified Dark Matter models. Despite overwhelming astrophysical evidence for Dark Matter and numerous experimental efforts to detect it, the nature of Dark Matter still remains a mystery and has become one of the hottest research topics in fundamental physics. Two searches for Dark Matter are presented, performed on data collected with the ATLAS experiment. They analyze missing-energy final states with a jet or with top quarks. The analyses are explained in detail, and the outcomes and their interpretations are discussed, also in view of the precedent analysis of theoretical approaches. Given its depth of coverage, the book represents an excellent reference guide for all physicists interested in understanding the theoretical and experimental considerations relevant to Dark Matter searches at the LHC.

Despite the success of general relativity in explaining classical gravitational phenomena, several problems at the interface between gravitation and high energy physics still remain open. The purpose of this thesis is to explore quantum gravity and its phenomenological consequences for dark matter, gravitational waves and inflation. A new formalism to classify gravitational theories based on their degrees of freedom is introduced and, in light of this classification, it is argued that dark matter is no different from modified gravity. Gravitational waves are shown to be damped due to quantum degrees of freedom. The consequences for gravitational wave events are also discussed. The non-minimal coupling of the Higgs boson to gravity is studied in connection with Starobinsky inflation and its implications for the vacuum instability problem is analyzed.

In this thesis we discuss the construction of an effective field theory (EFT) for non-relativistic Majorana fermions, show how to use it to calculate observables in a thermal medium, and derive the effects of these thermal particles on the CP asymmetry. The methods described in this thesis allow a systematic and effective description of the non-relativistic dynamics of a heavy Majorana fermion at finite temperature. The CP asymmetry is studied for hierarchical and nearly degenerate heavy-neutrino masses and the analysis includes the treatment of lepton-flavor effects. Heavy Majorana neutrinos are involved in many scenarios of physics beyond the standard model and, in the leptogenesis framework, they are at the root of the baryon asymmetry in the Universe. Besides simplifying exist in g results, the EFT approach provides useful tools for addressing even more involved observables. Indeed, taken together, the approach and the material presented here represent an important step toward a systematic improvement of our knowledge of the CP asymmetry in heavy-neutrino decays at finite temperature.

This book provides a remarkable and complete survey of important questions at the interface between theoretical particle physics and cosmology. After discussing the theoretical and experimental physics revolution that led to the rise of the Standard Model in the past century, the author reviews all the major open puzzles, among them the hierarchy problem, the small value of the cosmological constant, the matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the dark matter enigma, including the state-of-the-art regarding proposed solutions. Also addressed are the rapidly expanding fields of thermal dark matter, cosmological first-order phase transitions and gravitational-wave signatures. In addition, the book presents the original and interdisciplinary PhD research work of the author relating to Weakly-Interacting-Massive-Particles around the TeV scale, which are among the most studied dark matter candidates. Motivated by the absence of experimental evidence for such particles, this thesis explores the possibility that dark matter is much heavier than what is conventionally assumed.