Calculation of Physical Processes at the LHC

With the start of the age of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) two challenges face theoreticians and computational physicists. The first is about understanding theories beyond the Standard Model and producing verifiable predictions that can be tested against what the LHC and subsequent machines would produce. The second is to improve computational methods so that the new experimental precision is matched by a theoretical one. But this improvement is also crucial for the detection of potential deviations from Standard Model predictions and possibly also finding the elusive Higgs. This work tries to address problems in both areas. In the first part we study the effects of adding tension in considering a black-hole on a brane. Such black-holes are predicted by some models as potential phenomena at the LHC. We calculate the effects of adding tension on observable quantities of black-holes, namely, quasinormal mode frequencies and Hawking radiation, and we show how this improves predictions. In the second part we investigate the computational problem of extending the Britto-Cachazo-Feng-Witten (BCFW) method to 1-loop level. The BCFW has been successfully used in recent years to compute scattering amplitudes at tree-level by suitably complex-shifting external momenta and reducing diagrams to simpler ones. In our investigation we establish that the BCFW can be extended to 1-loop, which means that 1-loop integrands can be treated as trees and can be broken down further into even simpler trees using the BCFW. We explicitly look at the effects of the shift for the lowest three n-point cases, but also demonstrate how the result extends to arbitrary n.