Person:

Farhi, David

Some of the most arduous and error-prone aspects of precision resummed calculations are related to the partonic hard process, having nothing to do with the resummation. In particular, interfacing to parton-distribution functions, combining various channels, and performing the phase space integration can be limiting factors in completing calculations. Conveniently, however, most of these tasks are already automated in many Monte Carlo programs, such as MadGraph, Alpgen or Sherpa. In this paper, we show how such programs can be used to produce distributions of partonic kinematics with associated color structures representing the hard factor in a resummed distribution. These distributions can then be used to weight convolutions of jet, soft and beam functions producing a complete resummed calculation. In fact, only around 1000 unweighted events are necessary to produce precise distributions. A number of examples and checks are provided, including e +e− two- and four-jet event shapes, n-jettiness and jet-mass related observables at hadron colliders. Attached code can be used to modify MadGraph to export the relevant leading-order hard functions and color structures for arbitrary processes.

I give a high level overview of the state of particle physics in the introduction, accessible without any background in the field. I discuss improvements of theoretical and statistical methods used for collider physics. These include telescoping jets, a statistical method which was claimed to allow jet searches to increase their sensitivity by considering several interpretations of each event. We find that indeed multiple interpretations extend the power of searches, for both simple counting experiments and powerful multivariate fitting experiments, at least for h->bb at the LHC. Then I propose a method for automation of background calculations using SCET by appropriating the technology of Monte Carlo generators such as MadGraph.

In the third chapter I change gears and discuss the future of the universe. It has long been known that our pocket of the standard model is unstable; there is a lower-energy configuration in a remote part of the configuration space, to which our universe will, eventually, decay. While the timescales involved are on the order of 10^400 years (depending on how exactly one counts) and thus of no immediate worry, I discuss the shortcomings of the standard methods and propose a more physically motivated derivation for the decay rate. I then make various observations about the structure of decays in quantum field theory.