Distinguished Lecturer Series - Event Details
The Large Hadron Collider is now exploring the energy frontier of particle physics, searching for new particles and interactions. For the LHC to uncover many types of new physics, the "old physics" produced by the Standard Model must be understood very well. For decades, the central theoretical tool for this job was the Feynman diagram. However, Feynman diagrams are just too slow, even on fast computers, to allow adequate precision for complicated LHC events with many jets in the final state, events that are already visible in the initial LHC data. Over the past few years, alternative methods to Feynman diagrams have come to fruition. These new "on-shell" methods are based on the old principle of unitarity. They can be much more efficient because they exploit the underlying simplicity of scattering amplitudes, and recycle lower-loop information. I will explain how and why these methods work, and present some of the recent state-of-the-art results that have been obtained with them.