Paper detail

Supermodels: Early new physics at the LHC?

We investigate new physics that could be discovered with very little LHC data, beyond the expected sensitivity of the Tevatron. We construct "supermodels", for which the LHC sensitivity with 10 pb-1 luminosity is already greater than that of the Tevatron with 10 fb-1. The simplest supermodels involve s-channel resonances in the quark-antiquark and especially in the quark-quark channels. In the latter case, the LHC sensitivity with 0.1 pb-1 can already be greater than that of the Tevatron with 10 fb-1. We concentrate on easily visible final states with small standard model backgrounds, and find that there are simple searches, besides those for Z' states, which could discover new physics in early LHC data. Many of these are well-suited to test searches for "conventional" models, often discussed for larger data sets.