Supermodels: Early new physics at the LHC?

TL;DR

This paper introduces 'supermodels' that can potentially reveal new physics at the LHC with very minimal data, surpassing the Tevatron's sensitivity, especially through simple resonance searches in quark channels.

Contribution

It proposes the concept of supermodels, demonstrating their potential to detect new physics early at the LHC with minimal luminosity, focusing on simple, high-visibility final states.

Findings

LHC sensitivity with 10 pb-1 exceeds Tevatron with 10 fb-1 for certain models.

Quark-quark channel resonances can be detected with as little as 0.1 pb-1.

Simple resonance searches can discover new physics in early LHC data.

Abstract

We investigate new physics that could be discovered with very little LHC data, beyond the expected sensitivity of the Tevatron. We construct "supermodels", for which the LHC sensitivity with 10 pb-1 luminosity is already greater than that of the Tevatron with 10 fb-1. The simplest supermodels involve s-channel resonances in the quark-antiquark and especially in the quark-quark channels. In the latter case, the LHC sensitivity with 0.1 pb-1 can already be greater than that of the Tevatron with 10 fb-1. We concentrate on easily visible final states with small standard model backgrounds, and find that there are simple searches, besides those for Z' states, which could discover new physics in early LHC data. Many of these are well-suited to test searches for "conventional" models, often discussed for larger data sets.