A shortcut to new physics: using the archive of LHC measurements to constrain BSM models

<!--HTML-->A huge amount of effort and person-power goes into searching for evidence of beyond-the-SM (BSM) theories at the LHC. A search may take a large team over a year to produce, and even then may only focus on the model’s most spectacular signature. But many BSM theories could probably already be ruled out because they would have caused measurable distortions to well-understood spectra of “standard” processes. If one could quickly check how a signal would have manifested itself in the myriad of LHC measurements to date, a huge amount of person-power could be liberated to focus instead on the remaining models which are not already ruled out. CONTUR is a tool which compares inclusive-process event generation from MC BSM models to a bank of >150 LHC measurements preserved in Rivet+HEPdata, giving a rapid prior indication of which parts of a model’s parameter space are already ruled out, and providing a powerful complement to direct-search results in post-hoc BSM reinterpretations. In this talk, I will give an overview of this powerful new approach. I will then highlight the results from our most recent papers (https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.07172 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.02220), where we use this method to tackle a whole class of “Vector-like Quark” models and the 2HDM+a, and show complementary results to the direct search program.