YETI'09: rediscovering the standard model and the prospects for early discovery at the LHC

Europe/London
Description
The Young Experimentalists and Theorists Institute aims to promote interaction between the two halves of the PP community at the early career stage and encourage interest in phenomenology. The YETI aims to give a pedagogical introduction to a particular area of topical interest in particle physics. A key feature are the hands-on sessions in the afternoons. This year's YETI focuses on the LHC and "rediscovering the standard model and the prospects for early discovery". The YETI will provide updates on the status and commissioning of the four main LHC experiments, as well as discuss the early measurements that are expected to be made. Important lessons for the LHC can be learned from the startup of run II at the Tevatron. For the GPD's the underlying event is very important in many of the measurements, for example the jet energy scale or the missing transverse energy. After providing an introduction to event simulation, the various theoretical models of the underlying event will be discussed. As a dry run of what might be expected with early LHC data, the first hands-on session will demonstrate how the models can be tuned using the SHERPA Monte Carlo together with existing data from the Tevatron. Vector boson plus jet events are standard model backgrounds for many new physics signals, and we will review the vector boson + jet measurements at the tevatron, carefully comparing and contrasting with what is expected at the LHC. The second hands-on session will demonstrate how to make predictions for this type of events and make comparisons with the tevatron data. Top quarks are an important element of the Standard Model that also provide vector boson plus jet events, and one lecture is dedicated to this topic. The latest parton density functions and their impact on LHC cross sections will be discussed in detail. Finally, in anticipation of subsequent discoveries at the LHC, we will review tools for Beyond the SM models at the Tevatron and the LHC.