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High pT Physics at Hadron Colliders

2 November 2005

by Dan Green, Cambridge University Press. Hardback ISBN 0521835097, £70 ($110).

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Over the past several years, Fermilab physicist Dan Green has developed an excellent course on “High pT Hadron Collider Physics”. This is now published as a Cambridge monograph that successfully traces the important past and future roles of hadron colliders in testing and probing the limits of the Standard Model for electroweak and strong interactions. In so doing, it provides an accessible and pedagogic introduction to key features of parton-parton collisions in pp or pbar p interactions. It is not, however, an up-to-date survey of the field. Rather, the centre-piece of Green’s book concerns the motivation and experimental strategy for detecting, and subsequently studying, the Higgs scalar particle (the last undetected element of the minimal Standard Model).

Written by an experimentalist, the book is qualitative in nature and can even be enjoyed by final-year undergraduates, although to profit from it formal introductions to particle-physics phenomenology and quantum field theory are essential. (Such courses are fortunately part of most relevant Master’s programmes, and the reader is directed to excellent texts on the subject.) A key feature is the use of dimensional (heuristic) arguments to estimate key production and decay processes in hadron collisions. In addition, and uniquely, the COMPHEP freeware program has been extensively used to back up the dimensional arguments with lowest order computations. Despite some incompatibilities of nomenclature, this innovation is (to the reviewer) extremely successful.

The first chapter presents a concise summary of the Standard Model particles and their couplings, as well as a description of the Higgs mechanism for mass generation of the W and Z bosons. It lays out the key properties of the Higgs boson, and concludes with a list of issues that are not answered by the Standard Model. These issues are (rather superficially) discussed in chapter six, with chapters two to five directed towards experimental and phenomenological issues relevant to the Higgs search.

Chapter two describes, in an extremely accessible way, the detector requirements for identifying key high-p,sub>T parton-parton collision processes and the associated instrumental or irreducible physics-related backgrounds. The treatment of jet energy reconstruction and di-jet mass reconstruction is excellent. Inevitably, given the author’s background in the D0 and CMS experiments at Fermilab, the book leans towards examples of these experiments. In a few cases, some important instrumental innovations are not given adequate space (e.g. the real-time selection of heavy quarks as in the CDF experiment). Students could also have benefited from a description of the relative merits of the CDF and D0 experiments, and of course of the future ATLAS and CMS detectors at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The third chapter is good reading for any new graduate student. Green introduces key features of collider physics: the central rapidity plateau and its energy dependence; the basic parton-parton collision processes and their kinematics; the main gauge boson and gauge-boson pair production processes; and jet fragmentation. In all cases experimental data (usually not the latest) are used to justify heuristic arguments and COMPHEP calculations. A series of exercises complements the chapter.

Chapters four and five concentrate respectively on the more important results from Fermilab’s Tevatron and on the Higgs search strategy at the LHC experiments (for which chapter four’s material is invaluable as a guide to the experimental backgrounds to be expected from any Higgs signal at the LHC). As a reviewer, I enjoyed the experimental approach of these two chapters and their highly readable nature. However, the extremely important sections on heavy-quark (b and t quark) production were rather incomplete, given the unique measurements at the Tevatron and the important implications for the LHC. While the somewhat arbitrary choice of figures in chapter four (taken in most cases from the experiments) is adequate for lecture notes, it detracts from the book’s quality that an effort was not made to include the latest available data, and to combine data from the CDF and D0 experiments. Chapter five concerns the experimental strategy for detecting and studying the Standard Model Higgs particle at the LHC, and relies heavily on relevant preparatory studies from the ATLAS and CMS experiments.

Finally, the concluding sixth chapter discusses extensions to the Standard Model such as supersymmetry, as well as some of the open questions alluded to in chapter one. While extensions relevant to the LHC physics programme must be discussed, it felt as if this was a hurried addition. Judy Garland’s quotation from The Wizard of Oz: “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” is rather appropriate.

Published at a time when the CDF and D0 experiments are increasing their data samples by more than an order of magnitude, and in advance of the LHC, Green’s book has limited shelf life in its present edition. However, despite some shortcomings, its core is an excellent introduction for any graduate student starting out in experimental hadron-collider physics and can be strongly recommended. Dan Green should be congratulated on the overall quality of his text. Presumably, any new edition beyond 2007 will provide some interesting updates.

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