PanScales · Spanning TeV to GeV scales for collider discoveries and measurements

Over the coming years, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will search for new physics at ever higher energies, firmly establish many facets of the Standard Model that relate to the Higgs boson, and carry out a broad range of precision measurements. A tool that is central to this endeavour is the parton shower. Parton showers are immensely flexible tools, which simulate the strong-interaction physics that occurs between the TeV energy scales that the LHC was designed to probe, and the GeV mass scale of the protons and other hadrons that the LHC collides and detects. They are used in almost every LHC experimental analysis. Of all the first-principles theoretical methods used at the LHC, the parton shower is the only one that has not seen substantial advances in its underlying precision in the past 20 years. As a result, parton showers are becoming the critical weak link in LHC physics. This project will radically transform the way in which parton showers are conceived, by introducing innovative methods that establish the relation with another field of research called resummation, to which the PI has made ground-breaking contributions.The main outcome of the project will be a novel parton shower with accuracies up to an order of magnitude higher than in current approaches. This will be essential for reliably exploiting the information that is present across the full range of energy scales at high-energy colliders.