Free Meson Seminars

Parton Distribution Functions for discovery physics at the LHC

by Dr. Amanda Cooper-Sarkar (Oxford University, UK)

Thursday, February 9, 2023 from to (Asia/Kolkata)
at AG 69 and on zoom
Description Please contact rishi(at)theory(dot)tifr(dot)res(dot)in for the zoom meeting id and the password for this seminar.

At the LHC we are colliding protons, but it is not the protons that are doing the interacting. It is their constituents—quarks, antiquarks, gluons --collectively known as partons. We need to know how these partons are distributed in momentum at the energy scales of the collisions in order to understand LHC physics. These parton momentum distributions are known as PDFs—Parton Distribution Functions– and are a field of study in their own right. However, it is now the case that the uncertainties on Parton Distribution Functions are a major contributor to the background to discovery physics both in direct searches at the highest energy scales- of a few TeV--for physics beyond our Standard Model and in precision measurements of standard model parameters, like mW, sin2θW, which can provide indirect evidence for BSM physics.