Participation of Young Scientists to the Workshop LoopFest XIII, City Tech, New York, June 2014

Cuny New York City College Of Technology, Brooklyn NY

Investigators

Abstract

LoopFest is a series of workshops begun in 2002 and held annually at various universities across the US. This is a large meeting whose goal is to bring participants up to speed on recent developments regarding high-precision strong interaction effects at colliders. Although the conferences are all in the US, speakers and participants come from all around the world. There are several core members of the scientific organizing committee. These physicists are engaged in a program to advance research in and understanding of quantum chromodynamics. Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) governs the strong interactions of elementary particles, and its study at high energies is increasingly shared by both elementary particle and nuclear physics. The aim of the LoopFest workshops is to coordinate activities focused on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and on high precision research at a future linear collider. The LHC will be studying the Higgs boson extensively in the next few years, and strong interaction effects provide the biggest uncertainties in this study. There are many processes with a number of loops, virtual interactions that add to the complexity of the process, with a large number of incoming and outgoing gluons, particles that mediate the strong interaction. The workshops not only study these, looking at new computational approaches, but also study how to best interface the new results with event generators used by the experimenters. Thus, although the LoopFest organizers are all theorists, there are a number of experimental talks as well, in order to facilitate exchanges between the two communities. The organizers also ensure that junior physicists in attendance also have the opportunity to interact closely with the senior physicists about their research. This award provides support for students to travel to the 2014 LoopFest conference in June and for some of their expenses.