Higher Orders and Jets for LHC

Organizers: Matteo Cacciari (LPTHE Paris), Paolo Nason (INFN Milan), Giulia Zanderighi (Univ. Oxford, CERN)

June 29 - July 17, 2015, JGU Campus Mainz

The LHC will start the Run II phase at the beginning of 2015 with collisions at 13 or 14 TeV, and by the end of the year the collected luminosity will be more than the total luminosity collected in Run I. These new data are eagerly awaited since they will allow to pin down properties of the Higgs-like particle discovered, in particular the couplings. The final aim is to determine whether the newly discovered particle is a plain SM Higgs boson or not. Higgs couplings are typically extracted from relatively simple processes, which need to be computed and measured to high precision. In parallel to this, New Physics searches will explore scales beyond the bounds of today's exclusion limits.
Disentangling signals of New Physics from SM backgrounds is known to be a very hard task, which mainly requires a solid understanding of QCD in order to obtain reliable descriptions of the backgrounds and a good modeling and understanding of jet properties. Improving our understanding of QCD and our ability to make precise predictions is therefore crucial in order to fully exploit the potential of the LHC for discoveries and for precision measurements. By far and large, deepening our understanding of the QCD perturbative expansions in its coupling constant amounts to improving its predictive power for the LHC physics program.

The focus of this program will be the frontier of high-precision predictions for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) physics. It will mainly address shower Monte Carlo techniques and their matching to fixed-order calculations, resummation techniques in QCD and jet physics.