LoopFest is a series of workshops begun in 2002 and held annually at various universities across the US. This is a large meeting whose goal is to bring participants up to speed on recent developments regarding high-precision strong interaction effects at colliders. Although the conferences are all in the US, speakers and participants come from all around the world. There are several core members of the scientific organizing committee. These physicists are engaged in a program to advance research in and understanding of quantum chromodynamics. Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) governs the strong interactions of elementary particles, and its study at high energies is increasingly shared by both elementary particle and nuclear physics.
The aim of the LoopFest workshops is to coordinate activities focused on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and on high precision research at a future linear collider. The LHC will be studying the Higgs boson extensively in the next few years, and strong interaction effects provide the biggest uncertainties in this study. There are many processes with a number of loops, virtual interactions that add to the complexity of the process, with a large number of incoming and outgoing gluons, particles that mediate the strong interaction. The workshops not only study these, looking at new computational approaches, but also study how to best interface the new results with event generators used by the experimenters. Thus, although the LoopFest organizers are all theorists, there are a number of experimental talks as well, in order to facilitate exchanges between the two communities. The organizers also ensure that junior physicists in attendance also have the opportunity to interact closely with the senior physicists about their research.
This award provides support for students to travel to the 2014 LoopFest conference in June and for some of their expenses.
LoopFest is a series of workshops whose aim is to present and discuss the most recent results and techniques employed in the calculation of radiative corrections in scattering and decay processes of interest in high energy particle physics. The workshop is organized annually in the US, and it is attended both by US-based physicists and scientists from European and Asian institutions. LoopFestXIII took place at New York City College of Technology, Brooklyn, on June 18-20, 2014. It was attended by more than 80 scientists working in 11 nations. LoopFest XIII provided a forum for the coordination of activities focused on the theoretical challenges presented by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and by the ultra-high experimental precision of future lepton colliders. In this context, topics discussed at the workshop included: the potential of the LHC and future experiments for precision measurements, progress in multi-loop and multi-leg calculations and new computational approaches, automation of multi-loop and multi-leg calculations, interfacing fixed-order higher-order calculations with multi-purpose event generators, and the application of effective field theory techniques to precision calculations for collider observables. Several of the calculations presented at the workshop have direct and immediate relevance for experimentalists working at particle colliders such as the LHC. Many students and young post-doctoral associates presented their work at LoopFest XIII alongside more experienced physicists. The purpose of the present grant was to support the participation of graduate students and young post-doctoral fellows at LoopFest XIII. The funds were employed to cover the cost of the conference fee and part of the accommodation expenses for ten young theoretical physicists. The awarded scientists were invited to discuss their research work in seminar presentations at the workshop. Their participation to LoopFest XIII was beneficial both for the success of the workshop and for the professional development of the beneficiaries of the award. In addition, the young scientists whose participation at LoopFest was supported by this grant had the possibility of interacting with the local undergraduate and graduate students who attended the event. They discussed scientific topics, exchanged experiences, and created valuable connections for local undergraduate students interested in pursuing a career in science.
