FEBRUARY 26 THEORY GROUP SEMINAR

Carola F. Berger, Center for Theoretical Physics, MIT

"Twistor-Inspired Methods for Collider Physics"

Abstract

2008 is an exciting year for high energy physics because the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will begin operations, colliding protons at an unprecedented energy. The LHC will be able to shed light on the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking and possibly discover new physics. However, in the hadronic environment of the LHC, most events have very complex signatures. Thus searching for the Higgs or new physics is a veritable search for a needle in a gigantic haystack. A successful search then requires the precise understanding of potential signals and Standard Model backgrounds. This in turn necessitates precision calculations of these scattering processes. One of the main bottlenecks in such calculations is the computation of multi-leg one-loop amplitudes. I present a new technique based on on-shell recursion relations and unitarity which greatly simplifies the complexity of the calculations.