Seminars & Colloquia

Searches for New Physics in Colliders

Benjamin Brau, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

As physicists from around the world eagerly await the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider which will collide protons at a reduced center of mass energy of 7 TeV, the Tevatron Collider at Fermilab continues to crank out proton anti-proton collision data at 1.96 TeV. Both colliders will have sensitivity to the standard model Higgs boson, but what else do scientists look for in the proverbial haystack when sifting through these collisions? In this talk, I will review some of the motivation for building these enormous machines, briefly compare the two colliders and their detectors, and discuss some of the physics involved in colliding hadrons. I will show and explain some interesting events as they have been recorded by the CDF detector at the Tevatron, illustrating a variety of processes. Finally, I will discuss several searches for new phenomena at these colliders and their prospects for the future. [Full talk available as PDF.]