Grant: Subatomic Physics Envelope - Individual

We are entering in a new era in particle physics as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will become operational in 2008. This is the most powerfull particle accelerator that has been constructed so far and has enormous discovery potentials. Protons are accelerated in this machine to close to the speed of light, made colliding with each other inside the detectors. The product of these very high energy collision are a large number of elementary particles that are heavy enough that require large energies to be produced. The hope is, through analyzing these particles we can trace some new particles that we have not seen before. This is the direct way of new particle discovery. My research proposal is about indirect methods of detecting new particles. As mentioned above, we can LHC is expected to produce a large number of heavy quarks known as b quarks. Therefore, we are able to observe even very rare decays of these quarks which have a small likelihood to happen. These rare decays are sometimes quite susceptible to the interference from much heavier particles that may be out there but have not been discovered yet. My proposed investigation is to have a better understanding of these interferences which can then be compared against the experimental data from LHC. This comparison will hopefully give us some clues on what is acceptable and what is not acceptable for unknown heavy particles. It is much easier to directly discover something when we know roughly where to look for it.