Photon physics at the LHC

par Marco Delmastro (CERN)

vendredi 25 févr. 2011, 14:00 → 15:00 US/Central

Salle 101 (LAL)

The study of photon production at the Large Hadron Collider is important for many reasons. Thanks to their well-measured energy, photons are used to calibrate the less-well-measured jet energy scale. The study of the direct photon production is a mean to measure the gluon distribution inside the proton, and to test the theoretical predictions of perturbative QCD. But even more importantly, QCD final states involving photons represent backgrounds to new physics processes explored at the LHC, the most famous (and experimental challenging) being the production of a Standard Model Higgs boson decaying in a photon pair. In this talk I will explore how photons are produced in proton-proton collision at the LHC, and how they are reconstructed and identified by the ATLAS detector. I will review the direct photon measurements done by ATLAS with the first LHC data, and address how the excellent ATLAS capability of measuring photons will lead to the Standard Model Higgs discovery (or exclusion) at LHC in the next years.

Poster SemM.Delmastro.pdf

Transparents Delmastro_Photons-LHC-ATLAS_LAL_NoBackup.pdf