Seminars in Particle Physics Phenomenology at the Physics Department of Torino

Parton shower event generators are essential tools for establishing the quantitative connection between theory and experiment. However, their flexibility comes with a trade-off: they generally offer lower formal accuracy compared to state-of-the-art analytic calculations, which in turn have more limited applicability. The poor accuracy of the inevitably employed parton shower generators introduces systematic uncertainties that affect all measurements at colliders. In this talk, I will discuss the efforts made by the PanScales collaboration to improve the logarithmic accuracy of parton showers. Until recently, this accuracy was limited to the leading logarithms. Specifically, I will demonstrate how we can achieve Next-to-Leading Logarithm (NLL) accuracy for processes involving two colored legs, such as color-singlet production, decay, and deep inelastic scattering. Furthermore, I will explore advancements beyond NLL for observables that are primarily sensitive to soft emissions, such as particle multiplicity and jet vetoes. These developments are crucial for refining our understanding of fundamental particle interactions and reducing uncertainties in present and future collider measurements.

The Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) provides a powerful theoretical framework for interpreting subtle deviations from the Standard Model and searching for heavy new physics at the LHC. Accurate interpretations of LHC data, however, rely on the precise knowledge of the proton structure in terms of parton distribution functions (PDFs). In this seminar, I will discuss the interplay between PDFs and the search for new physics. I will showcase a scenario for the High-Luminosity LHC in which the PDFs may completely absorb such signs of new physics, thus biasing theoretical predictions and interpretations. To address this challenge, I will present a simultaneous determination of PDFs and the SMEFT using the SIMUnet methodology. This approach integrates both PDF and SMEFT determinations into a single, coherent framework, making possible an assessment of the regions of parameter space in which the interplay is most phenomenologically relevant, both at the LHC and HL-LHC.