Thursday, November 18, 2010, 16:00
WHGA Auditorium
T. Becher, University of Bern
Abstract:
Even at very high center-of-mass energies particle collisions receive QCD contributions associated with low energies. They arise when energetic particles decay into collinear particles or emit soft particles. To obtain precise predictions for collider processes, it is important to isolate and understand these effects. Soft-Collinear Effective theory provides a new language to study the associated physics. At the beginning of my talk I'll discuss how QCD simplifies in the soft and collinear limits and how the corresponding structure is implemented into an effective theory. In the main part of the talk, I'll discuss applications of the framework, in particular to Drell-Yan and Higgs production at hadron colliders, and for a precise determination of the strong coupling constant from LEP data.