Philip Schuster  (SLAC)
Simplified Models and Obtaining a Robust Interpretation of Early Discoveries at the LHC
October 14, 2008


Low-energy SUSY and many other theories predict pair-production at
the LHC of particles with Standard Model quantum numbers that decay to
jets, missing energy, and possibly leptons.  If an excess of such
events is seen in LHC data, a theoretical framework in which to
describe it will be essential to constraining the structure of the new
physics.  In this talk, I'll propose a basis of four deliberately simplified
models, each specified by only 2-3 masses and 3-4 branching ratios,
for use in a first characterization of data.  Fits of these simplified
models to the data furnish a quantitative presentation of the jet
structure, electroweak decays, and heavy-flavor content of the data,
independent of detector effects.  These fits, together with plots
comparing their predictions to distributions in data, can be used as
targets for describing the data within any full theoretical model.