LHC Run II and the Precision Frontier
Coordinators: Radja Boughezal, Lance Dixon, Frank Petriello, Laura Reina, and Doreen Wackeroth
High-energy physics has entered an era of discovery. Run I of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ended with the discovery of a Higgs-like particle, almost fifty years after its theoretical prediction, leading to the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics. This success relied upon the quantitative description of Nature granted by a detailed understanding of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and electroweak (EW) phenomenology.
From parton distribution functions with robust errors, through calculations to the next-to-next-to-leading order and beyond in perturbative QCD, to the development of sophisticated Monte Carlo tools more faithful to the underlying hard dynamics, every advance from over a decade of research was needed to make this historic discovery possible. Run II of the LHC marks the beginning of the precision phase in our study of the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking. Quantitative QCD and EW analyses will become even more indispensable in unraveling the origin of what we have found, as well as in the search for new phenomena beyond the Standard Model.
During this program, a diverse group of experts will meet at the KITP in order to further advance the precision frontier to the stage needed to enable both measurements and discoveries at Run II of the LHC. Various topics will be discussed, in particular:
- the appropriate framework for combining parton showers with fixed-order calculations and analytic resummation,
- the future prospects and goals for NNLO multi-leg computations,
- the combination of QCD and EW corrections at high-energy colliders, and
- the prospects for improving PDFs for future precision measurements.