Ayres Freitas (U. of Pittsburgh)

Understanding new physics in a model-independent way at the LHC

A model-independent analysis of a new-physics signature of two leptons and missing energy at the LHC is presented. Generally this signal arises from heavy charged particles which each decay into a lepton and a weakly interacting stable particle. Instead of assuming specific models, I will classify the possible new-physics particles according to spin and weak interactions. I will then introduce several observables for the determination of the spin and couplings of the new particles, and demonstrate their usefulness using Monte-Carlo simulations. The results show that even for this signal with only two visible final-state objects one can almost completely disentangle the properties of all contributing particles, except for a few cases that remain indistinguishable.