Cosmology, Particle Physics and Phenomenology - CP3

Marie Curie Early Training Theory Fellow at CERN.

PhD Student at the Centre for Cosmology, Particle Physics Phenomenology at the UCLouvain. Supervisor: Fabio Maltoni.

Master's research on "Wilson lines in pQCD" under supervision of Eric Laenen at the nikhef institute, Amsterdam.

(Under)graduate student at Utrecht University.

I have started my Ph.D. working on the MadGraph/MadEvent (MG/ME) event generator. I have implemented new interactions, in particular the effective couplings between (pseudo-)scalars and gluons/photons. This has allowed me to familiarize with the implementation of new helicity routines and vertex structures in the MG/ME framework. I have also developed a code, MadAnalysis, suitable to analyze event files (LHEF and LHCO), i.e., produce plots, set analysis cuts, etc.

I have used the expertise gained during my Master's research on perturbative QCD, and in particular in the resummation of soft radiation in production and decays of strongly interacting particles, to calculate of the NLL soft gluon effects in double Z boson production at the LHC with Massimiliano Grazzini. We have implemented the results in a Monte Carlo program and compared our results with a fixed NLO calculation and with the results from the MLO event generator.

Furthermore I am interested in the phenomenology of top quark production and decays. In my first year of my PhD research I have take part to a common theoretical/experimental effort in our Centre (CP3), and proposed an improved method to set model independent bounds on the third row of the CKM matrix. In my second year I have spend quite some time to study the phenomenology of ttbar production, both in the SM and in 'model-independent' extensions. In this work we proposed a the possibility for a mass measurement of the top quark mass from the ttbar invariant mass and also a three-step analysis to discover and measure the properties of new physics resonances.

At the moment I am working in collaboration with John Campbell, Francesco Tramontano and Fabio Maltoni to study the NLO corrections to the t-channel single top production (starting from the 2->3 Born amplitude (4 flavor)).

Together with Thomas Gehrmann and Nicolas Greiner I am working on automatizing the dipole subtraction formalism for NLO in QCD calculations within the MadGraph/MadEvent framework. This includes automatic generation of the subtraction terms for the reals as well as the virtuals, and doing being able to do the (then finite) phase space integration.

Phenomenology of elementary particles