"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."
Physics at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will offer unprecedented opportunities to study and answer fundamental questions in particle physics. Discoveries at the LHC will give us the first look at the physics beyond the Standard Model, the subject of many speculations in the past. Those discoveries will set the direction for further developments in particle physics and will have a very broad impact on our understanding of physics in general. The goal of the PI's research is to establish convincingly the presence of New Physics at the LHC and to elucidate its origin. Because the LHC is a hadron collider, every bit of physics there depends on Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory that is used to predict an outcome of hadronic collisions. For the LHC purposes, QCD is perturbative but very complex. A better understanding of QCD is required to achieve the high goals of the LHC. The PI proposes to study and solve two outstanding problems related to QCD applications to the LHC physics: i) nextto-leading order (NLO) QCD computations for processes with large number of external particles and ii) the development of practical methods for next-to-nextto-leading order (NNLO) QCD computations for hard scattering processes at hadron colliders. The PI expects that these methods will find applications in other areas of particle phenomenology; to this end, he plans to pursue some studies in heavy quark physics as well. The broader impact of the proposed research derives from its importance for the success of the LHC physics program. Good understanding of QCD is required to extract unbiased information about physics beyond the Standard Model from the LHC data. The development of new computational methods envisioned in this proposal should open up the possibility to improve theoretical description of hard scattering processes at the LHC thereby leading to new opportunities for experimental analyses and the discovery and the investigation of New Physics. An integral part of the project will be collaboration with and the training of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.
