Thursday, February 9, 2006, 16:00
WHGA Auditorium
J. Stirling, IPPP Durham
Abstract:
High energy hadron colliders such as the LHC are nowadays one of the
standard set of experimental tools for studying the structure of matter
at the deepest level. They can be used both to create new states, such
as the Higgs boson, or to make precision measurements to search for
indirect evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model. It is remarkable
that these machines are so powerful despite the fact that the physics
that links the colliding particles (protons and antiprotons) with their
colliding constituents (quarks and gluons) is not particularly well
understood at the quantitative level. The talk will describe the
theoretical framework that underpins the use of hadron colliders as high
precision experimental tools.