Phenomenology of new Neutral Vector Bosons and Parton Distributions from Hadronic Fluctuations

The Higgs particle was first predicted in 1964, and was discovered in the summer of 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This discovery was the latest in a long list of successful Standard Model predictions spanning the last fifty years. However, some of the Standard Models predictions, such as massless neutrinos, are not in agreement with experiment. Thus, extensions of the Standard Model should be considered. Furthermore, some issues, such as how quarks are bound within the proton, are difficult to study from first principles. In paper I and II of this thesis, a class of models that contains a new TeV scale neutral vector boson is studied. The parameter space of this class of models is constrained using electroweak precision constraints and 13 TeV LHC data. Gauge anomalies are cancelled both by choosing appropriate fermion charges, and by adding Green-Schwarz terms. The Higgs mechanism is often studied at leading order, but there are also important radiative corrections. These radiative corrections, which change the ground state energy, can both be IR divergent and gauge dependent. In paper III it is shown how to solve both of these problems. In particular, IR divergences are shown to be spurious. In paper IV of this thesis, rapidity gaps at the LHC are explained by using a colour singlet two-gluon ladder exchange (BFKL). These exchanges, together with a soft-gluon model, are implemented in a complete Monte Carlo simulation, and reproduce observed rapidity gaps at the LHC. The momentum distributions of bound partons, quarks and gluons, are described by parton distribution functions (PDFs). In paper V and VI of this thesis, a physically motivated model for PDFs is presented. This model can reproduce proton structure function data, and gives a possible solution to the proton spin puzzle.