Automation of next-to-leading-order predictions for physics beyond the Standard Model at the LHC

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Stefan Dittmaier
• Subject Area: Nuclear and Elementary Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Fields
• Term: from 2017 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 337250025

In the second phase of data taking at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), precision will be of crucial importance, both in the search for new physics and in the the ultimate test of the successfully working Standard Model (SM). Precise theoretical predictions for particle reactions have to include quantum corrections of the strong and electroweak interactions, at least to next-to-leading order (NLO). The complexity of this problem calls for automation on the computational side. Recent years have seen tremendous progress in this direction for predictions within the SM - a process that was pushed by several groups using different concepts. In this project, we build on the well established programs OpenLoops and Collier, which were developed by our groups for automated amplitude generation and their numerical evaluation, and strive for the extension of OpenLoops to physics beyond the SM (BSM). Aiming at a rather flexible approach in general, we start with BSM models with extended scalar sectors and widely model-independent effective theories with higher-dimensional operators. First phenomenological applications will cover issues in electroweak precision physics with Higgs and electroweak vector bosons in those BSM models. The combination of OpenLoops+Collier with the multi-purpose event generator Sherpa offers a straightforward parton-shower matching and multi-jet merging framework and thus embeds our result into a toolchain that can be directly used by experimentalists in data analyses.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Philipp Maierhöfer