All-Order Precision for LHC Phenomenology

This award funds the research activities of Professor Simone Marzani at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the highest-energy particle collider in the world. It accelerates particles to very high energies and then collides them against each other. The idea behind this is Einstein's famous equation that allows mass and energy to be converted into each other: with enough collision energy, heavy particles can be created and the fundamental building blocks of Nature and their interactions can be studied at energies and distances never explored before. As a result, research in this area advances the national interest by promoting the progress of science in one of its most fundamental directions: the discovery and understanding of new physical laws. The LHC collides protons, which are strongly interacting, and further strongly-interacting particles are abundantly produced in every such collision. The research of Professor Marzani is focused on understanding the strong force, in order to achieve a very precise modeling of particle interactions which will in turn allow physicists to uncover new and rare phenomena hiding within the resulting data. This project is also envisioned to have significant broader impacts. Professor Marzani will involve a postdoc and graduate students in his research, and thereby provide critical training for junior physicists beginning research in this field. He also intends to give public lectures on his research results, and develop new course curricula based on results coming from the LHC. More technically, Professor Marzani will employ his expertise in all-order perturbative calculations to develop theoretical tools to perform accurate QCD phenomenology at the LHC. He will also use these tools in the context of Higgs physics, searches for new particles, and characterization of their properties. This proposal involves two main areas of investigation: accurate calculations for Higgs and electroweak boson production, and analytical studies of the properties of jets, which are ubiquitous in particle physics phenomenology.