Brian E. Cox

Pomwig: Herwig for diffractive interactions

Abstract We have modified the Herwig event generator to incorporate diffractive interactions. All standard Herwig hard subprocesses are available.

Detecting Higgs bosons in the bbar b decay channel using forward proton tagging at the LHC

A detailed study is presented of the search for Higgs bosons in the b channel in the central exclusive production process at the LHC. We present results for proton tagging detectors at both 220m and 420m around ATLAS or CMS. We consider two benchmark scenarios; a Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson and the mhmax scenario of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). Detector acceptance, smearing and event trigger strategies are considered. We find that the SM Higgs will be challenging to observe in the b channel without improvements to the currently proposed experimental configuration, but a neutral scalar MSSM Higgs Boson could be observable in the b channel with a significance of 3σ or greater within three years of data taking at all luminosities between 2 × 1033 cm−2 s−1 and 1034 cm−2 s−1, and at 5σ or greater after three years in certain scenarios.

Extracting Higgs boson couplings using a jet veto

Abstract We show that the Higgs bosons effective couplings to gluons and to weak vector bosons can be extracted simultaneously from an analysis of Higgs plus dijet events by studying the dependence of the observed cross-section upon a third-jet veto.

Anomalous two-neutron transfer cross sections at large separation in heavy ion reactions

Abstract It is shown that the average radial slope of two-particle transfer from factors for very heavy ion collisions is considerably smaller than expected. It is also demonstrated that this effect is not due to intrinsic excitation of reaction fragments, and that the average behavior masks a critical dependence of the slope on the angular momentum of the states excited in the transfer reaction.

Observation of intrinsic excitation in 160Dy following heavy-ion transfer reactions

Abstract The population of sidebands in 160 Dy has been observed following the 161 Dy( 58 Ni, 59 Ni) 160 Dy reaction. The intensity of discrete transitions in these bands, identified using particle-γ−γ coincidence measurements, was found to be weak compared to the ground-state band. A peak of width 500–600 keV at about 1 MeV, observed in the NaI spectra, is attributed to the decay of two- quasiparticle states to the ground-state band. A second peak at 400–500 keV is attributed to transitions between 2-quasiparticle states.