Search for New Physics at the LHC and Future Colliders

Dear Colleagues,

The field of high-energy physics is facing great challenges and opportunities in recent years. Although the Standard Model (SM) has been a great success, it cannot explain some long-standing physics phenomena, such as the existence of dark matter and dark energy, the non-zero mass of neutrinos, the asymmetry between matter and anti-matter, etc. Moreover, the SM also cannot solve the following fundamental physics problems: the naturalness of the Higgs boson mass, the strong CP problem in the strong interaction, the unification of strong and electroweak interactions, quantum gravity, and the reason for particle flavors, etc. Therefore, the SM needs to be extended to include new particles or interactions, leading to new physics beyond the standard model (BSM).

High-energy particle colliders are important scientific facilities to probe new physics models. As the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) nears the end of its running, next-generation colliders are under development. Proposals include the Circular Electron–Positron Collider (CEPC) and the Super proton–proton Collider (SppC); the Large Hadron–electron Collider (LHeC), the Future Circular Collider (FCC-ee, eh, hh), the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) and the International Linear Collider (ILC), etc. The explorations of various new physics models at these colliders are important references to evaluate colliders' scientific value and are of great significance to promote their ultimate realizations.

There are many kinds of new physics models, in which extra scalars, vector bosons, fermions and/or new interactions have been predicted, leading to interesting signals at the LHC and future colliders. If new particles and interactions appear at TeV scale or below, it is possible to discover them directly at the LHC. If these particles have larger mass or weaker interaction with the SM particles, it will be difficult to detect them directly at the LHC, but the existence of new physics may also modify the coupling strengths between SM particles. They can still be detected directly at future higher energy colliders, or probed indirectly via the precision measurements at colliders.

For future colliders, there are mainly two types of motivations. For example, in the energy frontier, scientists are proposing colliders with higher energy, and thus it may become possible to discover heavier particles directly, such as SppC or FCC-hh. In the precision frontier, meanwhile, scientists are proposing colliders with larger luminosity and smaller background pollution, and thus precision measurements may show the deviations to the SM predictions and probe new physics, such as CEPC or FCC-ee. For this, electron–proton colliders are also good candidates, because they have larger center-of-mass energies than lepton colliders and smaller QCD background than hadron colliders. Furthermore, the Pb-Pb and ion collisions at the LHC and future colliders may also be good candidates as an effective tool to search for new physics.

Theoretically, scientists have been trying to increase the accuracies of the SM predictions; to propose particular predictions sensitive to new physics; to construct new observables; and to improve the analysis techniques, etc. These progressions are also helpful for the new physics searching at the LHC and future high-energy colliders.

The aim of this Special Issue is to provide an exhaustive review of the status and prospects of the search for new physics at the LHC and future high energy colliders. This Special Issue welcomes both reviews and articles with both theoretical and experimental aims and both direct and indirect methods in new physics searches. Suggested topics include (but are not limited to) the following types of papers:

• Reviews on new physics searches at LHC;
• Reviews on new physics searches at future high-energy colliders;
• Experimental searches for new phenomena at the LHC;
• Theoretical predictions in new physics at the LHC or future colliders;
• Phenomenological studies in new physics and the corresponding collider tests;
• Novel techniques in phenomenological studies or data analysis;
• Constructions of novel observables sensitive to new physics at colliders;
• Probing new physics in Pb-Pb collisions;
• New techniques to improve the LHC and future collider experiments;
• Any other topics corresponding to searching for new physics at the LHC or future high energy colliders.

Dr. Kechen Wang
Dr. Ying-nan Mao
Guest Editors

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• beyond standard model physics
• Large Hadron Collider
• future proton-proton, electron-positron, electron-proton colliders
• collider experiments
• collider phenomenology
• new techniques for collider physics
• new physics in Flavor physics
• new physics in Pb-Pb collisions
• new physics related to Higgs bosons
• high-order calculations in QFT related to new physics at colliders