Next year, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will begin operation at CERN, colliding protons at a center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV, seven times greater than that currently available in pp collisions at Fermilabs Tevatron. The LHC luminosity should also be a factor of 10 to 100 greater than the Tevatrons. The combined rise in energy and luminosity represents the opening of a new window into electroweak-scale physics. There will be copious production of heavy states such as electroweak vector bosons and top quarks, and, it is anticipated, Higgs boson(s) and physics beyond the Standard Model. Are we ready to exploit this new window. That is, is Standard Model physics at the LHC understood well enough to confidently extract physics beyond the Standard Model. Of course the physics at the LHC is largely the physics of hard QCD processes (with important contributions from soft regimes as well). QCD itself will be probed in unprecedented regimes and with unprecedented statistics. QCD governs the production of electroweak states in and beyond the Standard Model. Pure jet final states also need to be understood, because jet production rates are so large. Jets can fake electroweak signatures such as leptons or photons, and can fake missing energy via mismeasurement. In general, QCD (plus electroweak) hard processes form significant backgrounds to almost all new physics searches at the LHC, as well as at the Tevatron.
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