PhD project: High Energy Jets
Project description
Dr Smillie does not plan to take a PhD student on this project starting in Sept 2024.
The LHC is colliding protons at twice the centre-of-mass energy of the Higgs boson discovery. This is an exciting opportunity for new physics discoveries, but also poses a problem to our theoretical predictions. The large range of energy scales can damage the convergence of the perturbative expansion through the appearance of logarithms at all orders in the coupling. The High Energy Jets framework is a perturbative framework incorporating these corrections at all orders in the coupling at the matrix-element level which is then implemented as a fully-flexible event generator. This approach has been seen to describe LHC data well, including some important cases where more traditional approaches have failed. Our predictions are particularly important to describe the production of a Higgs boson with jets which is an important process to determine its properties and test the method of electroweak symmetery breaking. Current priorities include moving to next-to-leading order accuracy, improving the analytical description of the amplitudes, making predictions for WW-plus-jets for the first time and further enhancing the description through merging with parton showers.
In this project, you will typically perform both analytical calculations and numerical implementation, taking a theoretical idea right through to comparison with LHC data.
References:
- Constructing All-Order Corrections to Multi-Jet Rates
- The Factorisation of the t-channel Pole in Quark-Gluon Scattering
- Multiple Jets at the LHC with High Energy Jets
- Z/gamma* plus Multiple Hard Jets in High Energy Collisions
- Higgs-boson plus Dijets: Higher-Order Matching for High-Energy Predictions
Project supervisor
- Dr Jenni Smillie (School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Edinburgh)
The project supervisor welcomes informal enquiries about this project.
Find out more about this research area
The links below summarise our research in the area(s) relevant to this project:
- Find out more about Collider Physics.
- Find out more about Fundamental Theory.
- Find out more about Particle Physics Theory.
- Find out more about the Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics.
What next?
- Find out how to apply for our PhD degrees.
- Find out about fees and funding and studentship opportunities.
- View and complete the application form (on the main University website).
- Find out how to contact us for more information.