High Energy Physics

As an experimentalist involved in the search for physics beyond the Standard Model at the LHC, one must choose carefully which signatures to pursue. While theoretical guidance in identifying well motivated gaps in the coverage of “natural” BSM extensions is an important ingredient in this choice, unexplored territory is often unexplored for a reason, namely that there are likely non-trivial (“tricky”) experimental difficulties. One must thus consider the risk (time) vs. reward (discovery) in deciding what to pursue. In this talk, I will take you through my though process as I was confronted with this optimization problem in Run 1 of the LHC, using the CMS search for disappearing tracks (sensitive to AMSB supersymmetric scenarios) as an example of what non-trivial experimental difficulties are encountered in such an analysis. I will conclude with a discussion of how my thinking on this topic has evolved for Run 2 of the LHC that has just recently begun.

I will show how hydrodynamics is modified if the underlying fluid constituents are massless Weyl fermions, which are anomalous at the quantum level. Because of the nondissipative nature of the modification I will construct a partition function which compactly describes the transport properties of the system and I will explain how the anomalous properties can be understood in terms of kinetic theory and heat kernels. Finally I will comment on possible applications to heavy-ion collisions, condensed matter systems such as Weyl-semi metals and potential future questions such as anomalous corrections to entanglement entropy.