An Introduction to the LHC Olympics

The LHC Olympics is a series of workshop aimed at encouraging theorists and experimentalists to prepare for the soon-to-be-online Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. One aspect of the LHC Olympics program consists of the study of simulated data sets which represent various possible new physics signals as they would be seen in LHC detectors. Through this exercise, LHC Olympians learn the phenomenology of possible new physics models and gain experience in analyzing LHC data. Additionally, the LHC Olympics encourages discussion between theorists and experimentalists, and through this collaboration new techniques could be developed. The University of Washington LHC Olympics group consists of several first-year graduate and senior undergraduate students, in both theoretical and experimental particle physics. Presented here is an introduction to how such an LHC Olympics study is done. Various basic analysis tools and techniques are discussed.