Physics Colloquium

Abstract:

Quarks and gluons are ubiquitous in the debris of the proton-proton collisions of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), but they can also signal the presence of massive particles that are signs of new physics: they are the needle in the proverbial haystack…of needles. However, for the first time in the history of particle physics, the collision energy at the LHC is often well above the scale of electroweak symmetry breaking. I will walk you through why the LHC is such a fantastic “quark and gluon” machine, how new techniques to image the events observed at the LHC allow us probe jets — the observable manifestation of quarks and gluons — in exquisite detail, and present results in searching for signs of new physics using Lorentz-boosted object tagging approaches in the ATLAS Experiment. These techniques are being deployed with great success successfully in searches for new particles and precision measurements of the Standard Model, in both of which my group is deeply involved. I will then look toward the future and describe new instrumentation and algorithms that we’re developing to identify and record Lorentz-boosted hadronic objects in future runs of the LHC.