Review of Searches for Rare Processes and Physics Beyond the Standard Model at HERA

TL;DR

This review summarizes HERA's electron-proton collision data, highlighting measurements of proton structure, rare processes like W/Z production, and searches for new physics beyond the Standard Model, using the full dataset from H1 and ZEUS.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of experimental results from HERA on proton structure, rare processes, and beyond Standard Model searches with the complete data set.

Findings

Observation of W and Z boson production

Constraints on leptoquarks and supersymmetric models

No definitive evidence for new physics beyond the Standard Model

Abstract

The electron-proton collisions collected by the H1 and ZEUS experiments at HERA comprise a unique particle physics data set, and a comprehensive range of measurements has been performed to provide new insight into the structure of the proton. The high centre of mass energy at HERA has also allowed rare processes to be studied, including the production of W and Z bosons and events with multiple leptons in the final state. The data have also opened up a new domain to searches for physics beyond the Standard Model including contact interactions, leptoquarks, excited fermions and a number of supersymmetric models. This review presents a summary of such results, where the analyses reported correspond to an integrated luminosity of up to 1 fb^-1, representing the complete data set recorded by the H1 and ZEUS experiments.