Spring Institute 2014: High-energy physics after LHC Run I

The Spring Institute 2014-1 will focus on several hot topics of high-energy physics, with a special emphasis on LHC phenomenology. Beyond the discovery of the Higgs boson, certainly a breakthrough in particle physics, the LHC has carried out a number of outstanding Standard Model measurements, in both electroweak and strong sectors, and severely constrained a number of new physics models.The forthcoming run at 14 TeV will allow more refined precision studies, thus giving us the chance to make clear statements on many scenarios beyond the Standard Model. The Spring Institute will try to address some of such topics, by reviewing the state of the art of theoretical calculations and predictions, and presenting a few recent experimental measurements. The miniworkshop `Hunting for Supersymmetry at the LHC' will deal with the searches for supersymmetry after the 8 TeV LHC run, with a theory review, along with updated results on behalf of CMS and ATLAS experiments. Besides supersymmetry, we will also discuss the challenges for new physics searches in Higgs decays into a Z and a lepton pair, as well as the lesson which can be learned, in the flavour sector, from the latest LHCb measurements. Also, the implications of the found value for the Higgs mass on the vacuum metastability will be debated. From the Standard Model viewpoint, special care will be taken about the phenomenology of top quarks, such as the production of top pairs with a Higgs boson, yielding a direct access to the top Yukawa coupling, and higher-order calculations of the cross-section ratio ttbb/ttjj. Recent computations of diphoton production, the main background for Higgs searches, will also be investigated, paying special attention to the inclusion of NNLO corrections. Furthermore, the predictions of models for proton-proton scattering at the LHC will be presented, and compared with the total, elastic and inelastic cross sections measured at TOTEM, CMS, ATLAS and ALICE. Finally, the role of the running coupling constant at the intersection of perturbative and non-perturbative QCD regimes will be investigated in the context of the quark-hadron duality.