Date: Wednesday 10th May 2006
Title: Diffractive Physics as a tool to study new physics at the LHC
Speaker: Prof Valery Khoze (IPPP, University of Durham)
Abstract
There has been increasing interest in the past few years
in the possibility of using dffractive processes as a search
tool for new physics at the LHC.
We discuss the theoretical
motivations behind recent proposals to add forward proton
tagging detectors to the LHC experiments.
We show that the so called central exclusive production (CEP) processes
may provide an exceptionally clean environment to search for,
and identify the nature of, new particles at the LHC. These
studies are at the heart of the recent FP-420 R&D project.
The main emphasis is on Higgs production,where the central system
could consist of 2-b-quark jets or WW*, and no other activity.
Special attention is paid to the Higgs sector of the MSSM, where
the CEP is found to have special advantages
as compared to the traditional non-diffractive strategies.
We briefly discuss the current diffractive programs at the Tevatron and
HERA,
focussing on measurements which have a direct impact on the case for
forward detectors at the LHC.
We show that the physics program
with the tagged forward protons is in many aspects complementary
to both, the standard approaches at hadronic colliders,
and to the studies at a future linear collider.