So far the LHC has yet to find clear evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model, and with Run-2 concluded, we will no longer be seeing significant upgrades to the center of mass energy until a future collider. This situation motivates two complementary approaches to search for BSM physics at the LHC: perform precision measurements of known processes and look for deviations from SM predictions, and to try to expand our searches to cover as wide a range of signatures as possible. I will discuss work I have done in my PhD that follows both approaches. The first is a recently completed CMS measurement of the Drell-Yan forward-backward asymmetry, which used a new template-fitting approach to allow greater precision and interpretability. The second is work developing new methods of model-agnostic searches made possible by new applications of machine learning. The promise of these techniques was demonstrated in the recent LHC Olympics community data challenge, and they are now being employed in CMS in an ongoing dijet anomaly search.
Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://stanford.zoom.us/j/98973156241?pwd=cEU5RFdlVXoyc0JTeTlDMkozKzQ5UT09
Andrew Bradshaw, Sander Breur
(bradshaw@slac, sanderb@slac)