LHC for Grad Students

20Oct06

If I had ten cents for every time someone told me that the dawn of the LHC era is a very special time to be a graduate student, then I would have just enough money to purchase an ice cream sandwich at Diddy Riese in Los Angeles. If, instead, I had ten pence for every time someone told me the same thing… then I’d have just enough money to buy a soft serve ice cream from the vendor at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Cambridge. Unfortunately, the latter seems to have packed up for the Winter in search of warmer climates, so for now I’m left thinking about the LHC without ice cream.

Dessert notwithstanding, there’s a lot to be learned by fresh phenomenology postgrads. I recently formed a ‘journal’ club with a Stanford-bound American student here to study LHC Collider phenomenology, and so have been on the lookout for resources for students with a background in quantum field theory and not much else. Below are some of the resources I’ve found:

• Stanford University, Physics 450 (2006): LHC Physics. Notes from Professor M. Peskin’s “LHC Physics” course. Our reading group will primarily follow Peskin’s layout of topics
• Cambridge University Press books (so noted because Cambridge students get a 20% discount!):
  • QCD and Collider Physics, by Ellis, Stirling, and Webber. The latter two are from the University of Durham and Cambridge, respectively. This is the primary text of Professor Peskin’s course above.

  • The Physics of Particle Detectors, by Green.

• 1st CERN-Fermilab Hadron Collider Physics Summer School. Includes webcasts of all lectures.
• SLAC Summer Institute 2006: The Next Frontier: Exploring with the LHC. Also with webcasts of lectures. Of notable interest is LBL physicist Ian Hinchcliffe’s closing presentaiton. For those, like me, who are quite fond of closing presentations at these types of schools, I would suggest those by Hitoshi Murayama, Nima Arkani-Hamed, and Rocky Turner from recent SSIs available online.
• UC Berkeley, Physics 229C (2006): LHC Physics & BSM. A good list of resources from Professor L. Hall’s “LHC Physics” course at UC Berkeley.
• 3rd LHC Olympics, along with a positive review of the event and the Harvard team. The LHC Olympics is a friendly training exercise for theoretical physicists interested in learning how to extract information from (simulated) LHC data to make meaningful constraints on models. Talks from the last conference are available online.
• Physics at the LHC (Crakow conference). Another conference, no video but lecture slides are available online.

For those who are graduate students in the UK, here are a few relevant upcoming events that I’ve found (via HEP conferences and Spires conferences): (If anybody has any suggestions for similar events for a graduate audience, please leave a comment!)

• UK Annual Theory Meeting: Grey’s College, University of Durham.18-20 December 2006.
• Higgs-Maxwell Particle Physics Workshop: Royal Society of Edinburgh. 07 February 2007.
• UK BSM 2007: Liverpool. 29-30 March 2007.
• BritGrav7: Cambridge. 3-4 April 2007.
• 1st MCNet School: “Physics and Techniques of Event Generators.” Durham University. 18-20 April 2007.
• UK HEP Forum: “First Data from the LHC.” Coseners’s House, Abingdon. 6-7 May 2006.
• PASCOS 07: 13th International Symposium on Particles, Strings, and Cosmology at Imperial College in London. 2-7 July 2007.
• EPS-HEP2007: International Europhysics Conferencec on High Energy Physics in Manchester. 19-25 July 2007.
• SUSY07: 15th International Conference on Supersymmetry and the Unification of Fundamental Interactions Karlsruhe, Germany. 26 July – 1 August 2007.

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