A: The CMS apparatus was identified, a few years before the start of the LHC operation at CERN, to feature properties well suited to particle-flow (PF) reconstruction: a highly-segmented tracker, a fine-grained electromagnetic calorimeter, a hermetic hadron calorimeter, a strong magnetic field, and an excellent muon spectrometer. A fully-fledged PF reconstruction algorithm tuned to the CMS detector was therefore developed and has been consistently used in physics analyses for the first time at a hadron collider. For each collision, the comprehensive list of final-state particles identified and reconstructed by the algorithm provides a global event description that leads to unprecedented CMS performance for jet and hadronic τ decay reconstruction, missing transverse momentum determination, and electron and muon identification. This approach also allows particles from pileup interactions to be identified and enables efficient pileup mitigation methods. The data collected by CMS at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV show excellent agreement with the simulation and confirm the superior PF performance at least up to an average of 20 pileup interactions. 3 Reconstruction of the particle-flow elements 9 3.1 Charged-particle tracks and vertices 9 3.1.

This paper presents a search for the pair production of top squarks in events with a single isolated electron or muon, jets, large missing transverse momentum, and large transverse mass. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 19.5 fb −1 of pp collisions collected in 2012 by the CMS experiment at the LHC at a center-of-mass energy of √ s = 8 TeV. No significant excess in data is observed above the expectation from standard model processes. The results are interpreted in the context of supersymmetric models with pair production of top squarks that decay either to a top quark and a neutralino or to a bottom quark and a chargino. For small mass values of the lightest supersymmetric particle, top-squark mass values up to around 650 GeV are excluded.Published in the European Physical Journal C as doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-013-2677-2. IntroductionThe standard model (SM) has been extremely successful at describing particle physics phenomena. However, it suffers from such shortcomings as the hierarchy problem, where fine-tuned cancellations of large quantum corrections are required in order for the Higgs boson to have a mass at the electroweak symmetry breaking scale of order 100 GeV [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Supersymmetry (SUSY) is a popular extension of the SM that postulates the existence of a superpartner for every SM particle, with the same quantum numbers but differing by one half-unit of spin. SUSY potentially provides a "natural", i.e., not fine-tuned, solution to the hierarchy problem through the cancellations of the quadratic divergences of the top-quark and top-squark loops. In addition, it provides a connection to cosmology, with the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP), if neutral and stable, serving as a dark matter candidate in R-parity conserving SUSY models. This paper describes a search for the pair production of top squarks using the full dataset collected at √ s = 8 TeV by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment [7] at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) during 2012, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.5 fb −1 . This search is motivated by the consideration that relatively light top squarks, with masses below around 1 TeV, are necessary if SUSY is to be the natural solution to the hierarchy problem [8][9][10][11][12]. These constraints are especially relevant given the recent discovery of a particle that closely resembles a Higgs boson, with a mass of ∼125 GeV [13][14][15]. Searches for top-squark pair production have also been performed by the ATLAS Collaboration at the LHC in several final states [16][17][18][19][20], and by the CDF [21] and D0 [22] Collaborations at the Tevatron.The search presented here focuses on two decay modes of the top squark ( t): t → t χ 0 1 and t → b χ + . These modes are expected to have large branching fractions if kinematically allowed. Here t and b are the top and bottom quarks, and the neutralinos ( χ 0 ) and charginos ( χ ± ) are the mass eigenstates formed by the linear combination of the gauginos and higgsinos, which are the fermi...

A measurement of inclusive W and Z production cross sections in pp collisions at √ s = 7 TeV is presented. The electron and muon decay channels are analyzed in a data sample collected with the CMS detector at the LHC and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 36 pb

We report the first measurements of inclusive W and Z boson cross sections times the corresponding leptonic branching ratios for pp collisions at √ s = 1.96 TeV based on the decays of the W and Z bosons into electrons and muons. The data were recorded with the CDF II detector at the Fermilab 4Tevatron and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 72.0 ± 4.3 pb −1 . We test e-µ lepton universality in W decays by measuring the ratio of the W → µν to W → eν cross sections and determine a value of 0.991 ± 0.004(stat.) ± 0.011(syst.) for the ratio of W −ℓ−ν couplings (gµ/ge). Since there is no sign of non-universality, we combine our cross section measurements in the different lepton decay modes and obtain σW ×Br(pp → W → ℓν) = 2.749 ± 0.010(stat.) ± 0.053(syst.) ± 0.165(lum.) nb and σ γ * /Z × Br(pp → γ * /Z → ℓℓ) = 254.9 ± 3.3(stat.) ± 4.6(syst.) ± 15.2(lum.) pb for dilepton pairs in the mass range between 66 GeV/c 2 and 116 GeV/c 2 . We compute the ratio R of the W → ℓν to Z → ℓℓ cross sections taking all correlations among channels into account and obtain R = 10.84 ± 0.15(stat.) ± 0.14(syst.) including a correction for the virtual photon exchange component in our measured γ * /Z → ℓℓ cross section. Based on the measured value of R, we extract values for the W leptonic branching ratio, Br(W → ℓν) = 0.1082 ± 0.0022; the total width of the W boson, Γ(W ) = 2092 ± 42 MeV; and the ratio of W and Z boson total widths, Γ(W )/Γ(Z) = 0.838 ± 0.017. In addition, we use our extracted value of Γ(W ) whose value depends on various electroweak parameters and certain CKM matrix elements to constrain the Vcs CKM matrix element, |Vcs| = 0.976± 0.030.

An angular analysis and a measurement of the differential branching fraction of the decay B 0 s → φµ + µ − are presented, using data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 3.0 fb −1 of pp collisions recorded by the LHCb experiment at √ s = 7 and 8 TeV. Measurements are reported as a function of q 2 , the square of the dimuon invariant mass and results of the angular analysis are found to be consistent with the Standard Model. In the range 1 < q 2 < 6 GeV 2 /c 4 , where precise theoretical calculations are available, the differential branching fraction is found to be more than 3 σ below the Standard Model predictions. The LHCb collaboration 30 IntroductionThe decay B 0 s → φµ + µ − is mediated by a b → s flavour changing neutral current (FCNC) transition. In the Standard Model (SM) it is forbidden at tree-level and proceeds via loop diagrams as shown in figure 1. In extensions of the SM, new heavy particles can appear in competing diagrams and affect both the branching fraction of the decay and the angular distributions of the final-state particles.This decay channel was first observed and studied by the CDF collaboration [1, 2] and subsequently studied by the LHCb collaboration using data collected during 2011, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 1.0 fb −1 [3]. While the angular distributions were found to be in good agreement with SM expectations, the measured branching fraction differs from the recently updated SM prediction by 3.1 σ [4,5]. A similar trend is also seen for the branching fractions of other b → sµ + µ − processes, which tend to be lower than SM predictions [6-8].-1 - JHEP09(2015)179This paper presents an updated analysis of the decay B 0 s → φ(→ K + K − )µ + µ − using data accumulated by LHCb in pp collisions, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 1.0 fb −1 collected during 2011 at 7 TeV and 2.0 fb −1 collected during 2012 at 8 TeV centreof-mass energy. The differential branching fraction dB(B 0 s → φµ + µ − )/dq 2 is determined as a function of q 2 , the square of the dimuon invariant mass. In addition, a three-dimensional angular analysis in cos θ l , cos θ K and Φ is performed in bins of q 2 . Here, the angle θ K (θ l ) denotes the angle of the K − (µ − ) with respect to the direction of flight of the B 0 s meson in the K + K − (µ + µ − ) centre-of-mass frame, and Φ denotes the angle between the µ + µ − and the K + K − decay planes in the B 0 s meson centre-of-mass frame. Compared to the previously published fit of the one-dimensional projections of the decay angles [3], the full three-dimensional angular fit gives improved sensitivity and allows access to more angular observables.The decay B 0 s → φµ + µ − is closely related to the decay B 0 → K * 0 µ + µ − , which has been studied extensively by LHCb [6,9, 10]. Although B 0 s meson production is suppressed with respect to the B 0 meson by the fragmentation fraction ratio f s /f d ∼ 1/4, the narrow φ resonance allows a clean selection with low background levels. Furthermore, the contribution from the S wave, w...