This was closely followed by an analysis of QCD jet multiplicities at the Fermilab Tevatron, to justify the approximation of exponentiation of soft QCD jets, which is in turn useful in studying the usefulness of the minijet veto technique. The paper is Minijet structure of High E_T Hadronic Collisions. The analysis was performed using JETRAD.
My thesis research was the investigation of pp -> VVjj -> Hjj at the LHC, with subsequent detection by various decay modes depending on the mass: H -> gamma gamma, H -> tau tau, and H -> WW.
As a follow-up to the H -> tau tau study, my advisor and I together with Tilman Plehn looked at what happens for this decay in the MSSM. We discovered that VV -> H truly has been neglected, because it turns out that either hjj or Hjj -> tau tau jj should be observable everywhere in MSSM parameter space with reasonable integrated luminosity, and for some regions both h and H would be observed. (Note: it is possible to tune A_t such that the decay to taus disappear in favor of photons, but there is no loss of coverage as the photon mode is also excellent.) The paper is available here.
In addition to my thesis research I have joined the Madgraph/HELAS collaboration, consisting of Kaoru Hagiwara and Junichi Kanzaki of KEK, Tim Stelzer of UIUC, Kosuke Odagiri of Durham, and myself. We have expanded the Feynman amplitude code generator and helicity amplitude library to include Majorana fermions, many non-renormalizable verticies (dipole moments, Goldstinos, KK gravitons), amplitude output in the color scheme of HERWIG and other popular parton shower Monte Carlos, and an interface with HDECAY. The complete MSSM Lagrangian with all couplings and mixings is to follow sometime in the near future. The new version of Madgraph has been tested seccessfully for complicated processes with up to 8 external fermions (I used such code to examine the EW background to H -> WW (leptonic) plus two forward quark jets at the LHC).
I have also spent some time pursuing the phenomenology of Kaluza-Klein graviton emission in theories with large extra dimensions. So far this has concentrated on Drell-Yan plus missing energy (real K-K graviton emission) for the Tevatron and LHC. This mode is quite good, although not quite competitive with monojets + missing energy; we can put exclusion limits on the string scale of about 5.4 TeV at the LHC with 100 fb^-1 data. The paper is availble here.
My CV (PostScript format).