| With the LHC turning on, the Tevatron running better than ever, and dark matter direct detection experiments pushing to ever higher sensitivities, we are on the cusp of a new era in particle physics. Over the next decade, these experiments will likely discover the mechanism responsible for electroweak symmetry breaking, and may well uncover the identity of particle dark matter. This thesis addresses some topics in the phenomenology of TeV-scale physics which we may hope to probe at these experiments. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction, reviewing physics at this scale and motivating phenomenologists' excitement and expectations. Chapter 2 discusses ways to incorporate dark matter particles into a particular model of electroweak symmetry breaking, making sure that they remains stable against anomalous decays. Chapter 3 discusses an interesting class of dark matter models which would leave a striking signal at direct detection experiments. Chapter 4 discusses a new collider based probe of electroweak symmetry breaking, designed to look for models that approximate the Standard Model at the electroweak scale, but which deviate from it at higher energies. Chapter 5 discusses another collider based measurement, this one designed to measure the polarized tops one expects from the decay of certain new-physics states. Finally, chapters 6 and 7 present two new jet algorithms, useful for interpreting messy collider data and looking for signals of new physics. Chapter 8 contains the conclusions. |
