Giving an accurate account of the concepts, theorems and their justification, this book is a systematic treatment of perturbative QCD. It relates the concepts to experimental data, giving strong motivations for the methods. Ideal for graduate students starting their work in high-energy physics, it will also interest experienced researchers.
Many high-energy collider experiments (including the current Large Hadron Collider at CERN) involve the collision of hadrons. Hadrons are composite particles consisting of partons (quarks and gluons), and this means that in any hadron-hadron collision there will typically be multiple collisions of the constituents — i.e. multiple parton interactions (MPI). Understanding the nature of the MPI is important in terms of searching for new physics in the products of the scatters, and also in its own right to gain a greater understanding of hadron structure. This book aims at providing a pedagogical introduction and a comprehensive review of different research lines linked by an involvement of MPI phenomena. It is written by pioneers as well as young leading scientists, and reviews both experimental findings and theoretical developments, discussing also the remaining open issues.
This book will be of great interest to advanced students and researchers in the area of high energy theoretical physics. Being the most complete and updated review volume on Perturbative QCD, it serves as an extremely useful textbook or reference book. Some of the reviews in this volume are the best that have been written on the subject anywhere.
Among resummation techniques for perturbative QCD in the context of collider and flavor physics, soft-collinear effective theory (SCET) has emerged as both a powerful and versatile tool, having been applied to a large variety of processes, from B-meson decays to jet production at the LHC. This book provides a concise, pedagogical introduction to this technique. It discusses the expansion of Feynman diagrams around the high-energy limit, followed by the explicit construction of the effective Lagrangian - first for a scalar theory, then for QCD. The underlying concepts are illustrated with the quark vector form factor at large momentum transfer, and the formalism is applied to compute soft-gluon resummation and to perform transverse-momentum resummation for the Drell-Yan process utilizing renormalization group evolution in SCET. Finally, the infrared structure of n-point gauge-theory amplitudes is analyzed by relating them to effective-theory operators. This text is suitable for graduate students and non-specialist researchers alike as it requires only basic knowledge of perturbative QCD.
In an epoch when particle physics is awaiting a major step forward, the Large Hydron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva will soon be operational. It will collide a beam of high energy protons with another similar beam circulation in the same 27 km tunnel but in the opposite direction, resulting in the production of many elementary particles some never created in the laboratory before. It is widely expected that the LHC will discover the Higgs boson, the particle which supposedly lends masses to all other fundamental particles. In addition, the question as to whether there is some new law of physics at such high energy is likely to be answered through this experiment. The present volume contains a collection of articles written by international experts, both theoreticians and experimentalists, from India and abroad, which aims to acquaint a non-specialist with some basic issues related to the LHC. At the same time, it is expected to be a useful, rudimentary companion of introductory exposition and technical expertise alike, and it is hoped to become unique in its kind. The fact that there is substantial Indian involvement in the entire LHC endeavour, at all levels including fabrication, physics analysis procedures as well as theoretical studies, is also amply brought out in the collection.
Exploring the phenomenology of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, LHC Physics focuses on the first years of data collected at the LHC as well as the experimental and theoretical tools involved. It discusses a broad spectrum of experimental and theoretical activity in particle physics, from the searches for the Higgs boson and physics beyond the Standard Model to studies of quantum chromodynamics, the B-physics sector, and the properties of dense hadronic matter in heavy-ion collisions. Covering the topics in a pedagogical manner, the book introduces the theoretical and phenomenological framework of hadron collisions and presents the current theoretical models of frontier physics. It offers overviews of the main detector components, the initial calibration procedures, and search strategies. The authors also provide explicit examples of physics analyses drawn from the recently shut down Tevatron. In the coming years, or perhaps even sooner, the LHC experiments may reveal the Higgs boson and offer insight beyond the Standard Model. Written by some of the most prominent and active researchers in particle physics, this volume equips new physicists with the theory and tools needed to understand the various LHC experiments and prepares them to make future contributions to the field.
This book addresses the confinement problem, which quite generally deals with the behavior of non-abelian gauge theories, and the force which is mediated by gauge fields, at large distances. The word “confinement” in the context of hadronic physics originally referred to the fact that quarks and gluons appear to be trapped inside mesons and baryons, from which they cannot escape. There are other, and possibly deeper meanings that can be attached to the term, and these will be explored in this book. Although the confinement problem is far from solved, much is now known about the general features of the confining force, and there are a number of very well motivated theories of confinement which are under active investigation. This volume gives a both pedagogical and concise introduction and overview of the main ideas in this field, their attractive features, and, as appropriate, their shortcomings.
