Objective
With the start of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN a new era of research of the fundamental laws of Nature has begun. Discoveries, such as Dark Matter particles, the Higgs boson and a refined Standard Model of Particle Physics (SM) will be the backbone for fundamental research in many areas of physics for years to come.
The proposed research contributes to this quest. We will provide precision theory predictions for the proton-proton scattering processes, thereby enhancing the discovery reach of the LHC experiments. The interpretation of the experimenters' data requires the comparison to such theory predictions. In the absence of such predictions, new physics signals may remain hidden, or backgrounds may be falsely identified as exciting new physics.
More concretely, we will make available precision simulations of the SM and, possibly, an extension thereof. We focus on scattering processes with many final-state objects. These processes are part of the new physics territory unlocked by the LHC and are a key to exploring new fundamental particles and phenomena. The targeted precision requires the computation of at least next-to-leading-order quantum effects within perturbative quantum-field theories. State-of-the-art physics studies, such as the production of tops, the Higgs boson, Z/W-bosons in association with jets, will kick start this research program.
The research methodology will be to exploit mathematical structures of scattering processes in order to resolve present computational bottlenecks. The seeds of a new methodology to deal with the complexity of scattering processes has appeared only recently. In fact, key advances go back to a string inspired approach to scattering amplitudes by E. Witten and, most recently, by N. Arkani-Hamed. Such methods have already allowed us to obtain new state-of-the-art results for the LHC experimenters with up to six final state objects including quantum corrections.
Fields of science
- natural sciencesphysical sciencestheoretical physicsparticle physicsparticle accelerator
- natural sciencesphysical sciencestheoretical physicsparticle physicsw bosons
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesastronomyastrophysicsdark matter
- natural sciencesphysical sciencestheoretical physicsparticle physicshiggs bosons
- social scienceslaw
Call for proposal
FP7-PEOPLE-2012-CIG
See other projects for this call
Coordinator
79098 Freiburg
Germany