Cristián H. Peña (Caltech) "Searches for New Physics at CMS and Precision Timing Detectors"

Searches for dark matter and supersymmetry are part of an ambitious and well motivated quest to discover new physics at the LHC. In the first part of this seminar I will be presenting two novel searches for new physics using the data collected by the CMS experiment. The first is a search for dark matter in multijet events using the razor variables to discriminate signal from background events. The second is a search for anomalous production of Higgs bosons in association with jets, where the Higgs is reconstructed through its diphoton decay channel. The second part of my seminar will cover cutting edge detector R&D towards a device with ~10 ps time resolution. Such detectors will have a positively disruptive impact in future experiments such as the High Luminosity upgrade of the LHC by maintaining the current event reconstruction performance, which is expected to otherwise significantly deteriorate due to the high pileup environment.