Physics and Astronomy Calendar

Particle collisions are expected at the Large Hadron Collider before the end of 2009, and the collision energy should reach 7 TeV in early 2010. Though the center of mass energy and luminosity will be well below the design values, the data will already be useful in the search for physics beyond the Standard Model. I will describe two proposed searches by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment that could observe new physics signatures with early data. One study searches for large missing energy in dijet events, which could be the result of pair production of squarks followed by the decay of each squark to a quark and a neutralino. The second study examines the data recorded when there are no proton-proton collisions at CMS in order to search for long-lived particles that come to rest within the detector volume.