Physics Colloquium

Please note that coffee and cookies will be delivered at 3:00pm in the seminar lounge.

Abstract: The Large Hadron Collider is currently running at its highest energy and luminosity. To exploit maximally the potential of this precise dataset to uncover physics beyond the Standard Model, it is of crucial importance to develop tools that faithfully characterise QCD dynamics. The large energy range accesible at the LHC provides a multi-scale probe of QCD, including the transition from the perturbative to the hadronisation regime. In this talk, I will discuss two complementary approaches to describe the perturbative component of collider events. First, I will focus on the accuracy of semi-analytic approaches based on logarithmic resummation and revisit the calculation of the average jet multiplicity, one of the most fundamental observables studied in collider physics. Alternatively, Monte Carlo event generators provide a fully exclusive description of collider events. I will present recent advances on improving the accuracy of their parton shower component and discuss the connection with analytic resummation. The last part of this talk will focus on another component of Monte Carlo generators, namely the description of multi-parton interactions and a novel data-driven proposal for their characterization.