Electroweak Symmetry Breaking at the SSC and LHC

Abstract

In this talk we survey the SSC and LHC signals and backgrounds for the physics of electroweak symmetry breaking. We study the process $pp \rightarrow WWX$ and compute the rate for the ``gold-plated'' signals $W^\pm \rightarrow \ell^\pm ν$ and $Z \rightarrow \ell^+\ell^-$ $(\ell = e,μ)$ for a wide variety of models. We use a forward jet tag and central jet veto to suppress the standard-model backgrounds. In this way we estimate the SSC and LHC sensitivities to the physics of electroweak symmetry breaking.