Abstract:

At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), many new physics signatures feature pair-production of massive particles with subsequent direct or cascading de- cays to weakly-interacting particles, such as SUSY scenarios with conserved R-parity or H -> W(\ell \nu) W(\ell \nu), often motivated by models of new physics which attempt to mitigate the hierarchy problem in the Standard Model. We introduce a set of dimension-less kinematics variables that can assist in the early discovery of processes of this type in conjunction with a set of vari- ables with mass dimension that will expedite the characterization of these processes, called the razor variables. We will discuss the derivation of these variables, working from examples motivated by the signal processes we are searching for. The phenomenology of the these variables will be described for both signal and background event topologies. Additionally, we will describe the design of analyses utilizing these variables, in particular focusing on the CMS SUSY searches in the all- hadronic, single lepton and di-lepton final states, applied to the 35 pb^{-1} 2010 and 5 fb^{-1} 2011 datasets at \sqrt{s} = 7 TeV. We will briefly discuss possibilities for new, exclusive searches for new physics for the LHC based on adaptations of these variables.