QCD and Collider Physics (Florence, GGI 2017)

10h course on QCD, MC's and 8h tutorials on QCD and the physics of colliders, in particular the LHC, by Fabio Maltoni and Marco Zaro

An introduction to the phenomenology of strong interactions at high-energy colliders is given. We focus on the basic concepts and results in perturbative QCD that allow us not only to describe but also reliably predict rates and features of SM (as well as of New Physics) events at the LHC.

1. The parton model: from DIS to hadron-hadron collider phenomenology.
2. Perturbative QCD as a weakly interacting theory of gluons and quarks at high-energy.
3. The IR structure of QCD in e+e- collisions: infrared safety, parton showers and jets.
4. Factorisation, DGLAP evolution, accurate and precise QCD predictions for LHC physics.
5. Selected topics in New Physics searches and SM measurements the LHC.

The course includes tests, simple exercises, fully worked out numerical calculations/simulations, and a complete and easy-to-use series of mathematica notebooks which support the computation at next-to-leading order accuracy of the total production cross section of a Higgs boson in gluon-gluon fusion at the

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Lectures (F. Maltoni)

Lectures are given on the blackboard.

A summary PDF of the lectures be found here:

Slide summary of the lectures​

Tutorials (M. Zaro)

8h of tutorials on QCD and aspects of computations in QCD, spanning from LO to NLO calculations with applications using MadGraph5_aMC@NLO.

QCD Exercises​

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We provide here complementary material to the lectures that can used by students to verify their understanding of the basic concepts.

LHC Phenomenology

• SM Higgs discovery at the LHC: Three important channels
• Simple Black Boxes: New gauge bosons

Higgs production at the LHC : A case study

1. pp>H at LO (1-loop): details of the calculation (Mathematica Notebook) HiggsGG-LO-mtfinite.nb​
2. pp>H at NLO: details of the calculation (Mathematica Notebook) higgsgg-nlo.nb​
3. pp>H at NLO: cross section evaluation for the LHC (Mathematica Notebook+PDF libraries to be compiled) phenHiggs.zip​.

The original paper by Sally Dawson on the NLO calculation can be found here​ and a note of the calculation results can be found in ​here.

Bibliography

The main references for the lectures are:

• QCD and collider physics, The pink Book, by Ellis, Stirling and Webber, Cambridge Press.
• Michelangelo Mangano write-up​ of his QCD lectures.

-- Main.FabioMaltoni - 2017-01-05