Impact of Energy and Luminosity upgrades at LHC on the Physics program of ATLAS

TL;DR

This paper evaluates how LHC upgrades, specifically increased luminosity and energy, will enhance ATLAS's physics capabilities, with energy upgrades improving mass reach and luminosity upgrades improving measurement precision.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of the effects of luminosity and energy upgrades on ATLAS's physics performance, highlighting their respective advantages.

Findings

Energy upgrade increases mass reach for new particles.

Luminosity upgrade improves measurement precision.

High pile-up at increased luminosity may limit some physics analyses.

Abstract

The impact on the physics capabilities of the ATLAS detector of possible LHC upgrades is discussed. As a benchmark, an increase in the luminosity by a factor of ten is considered. For comparison, a doubling of the LHC energy is also explored. Both upgrades significantly enhance the physics capabilities of ATLAS. As measured in terms of the mass reach for new particles, the energy upgrade is more powerful. However, in cases where the effect of an upgrade is to increase the precision of measurements as a result of the larger data samples, the luminosity upgrade can be at least as powerful. The pile-up of minimum bias events at higher luminosity could limit the physics performance of ATLAS in areas where tagging of forward jets is needed.