Project description
Beyond "old physics" signal detection at the Large Hadron Collider
For nearly half a century, the Standard Model of particle physics has been (and largely still is) the best model we have of our particle world, although we know there are some very important things it does not explain. The search for "new physics" that goes beyond the Standard Model to answer these open questions is generally well-directed – in many cases, we have a good idea of what we are seeking, we just have not found evidence of it yet. The EU-funded EFT4NP project is enhancing the mathematics that will help us detect new physics in experimental data, paving the way for new physics revelations from experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.
Objective
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is hunting for signs of New Physics (NP) in the vast amount of data collected by its experiments. If new states are heavier than the collider energy reach, their presence can be revealed by modifications of the interactions of the known particles. The Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) parametrises such deviations from the SM, extending the sensitivity to scales beyond those directly probed at colliders. Determining the parameters of the EFT will shed light on the nature of NP and will provide hints to the most important questions in particle physics, such as the shape of the Higgs potential, its relation to electroweak baryogenesis and the amount of CP-violation and its connection to the matter-anti-matter asymmetry. A dedicated campaign of measurements and their SMEFT interpretation is a major goal of the LHC and requires coordination between experimentalists and theorists.
I aim at making essential beyond the state-of-the-art theoretical contributions to the LHC SMEFT programme by:
1) Providing the first fully generic next-to-leading order QCD and electroweak Monte Carlo implementation of SMEFT operators, to allow theorists and experimentalists to perform realistic simulations.
2) Combining accurate SMEFT predictions with LHC data to constrain the operators through a novel robust global determination. The findings, particularly if different from the SM expectations, will point to the scale and nature of NP.
3) Exploring new challenging proposals, such as i) the impact of operator running and mixing and ii) the optimisation of ways of extracting the Higgs self-coupling and probing CP-violation at the LHC, two topics with profound implications for our theoretical understanding of particle physics.
The proposal plays to a key strength of my research expertise and my research record uniquely positions me to successfully lead this ambitious project, which is vital to exploit the full LHC potential.
Fields of science
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Funding Scheme
ERC-STG - Starting GrantHost institution
M13 9PL Manchester
United Kingdom