Blog on my journey in High Energy Physics
The last piece of the puzzle is what I actually do with these simulated events. This is where Rivet comes in. This rivet is not RIVET Rivet (Robust Independent Validation of Experiment and Theory) is a C++ framework used all over HEP to analyse Monte Carlo events in a way that closely mirrors published measurements. …
Continue reading "Hunting boosted Higgs bosons with Rivet at FCC-hh"
One slightly unintuitive fact about modern collider physics is that we simulate most things before we measure them. My project is no exception: a lot of the work happens in Monte Carlo (MC) generators long before anyone thinks about a real detector. For the FCC studies, I mainly use two tools: MadGraph and Herwig. Both …
Continue reading "How we simulate collisions before they happen: MadGraph and Herwig"
Credit: AI (Not my best AI work but just pretend this is FCC's tunnel) If you’ve followed my posts, you already know I spend a lot of time thinking about a machine that does not exist yet: the Future Circular Collider (FCC). So it is fair to ask: why do we need another collider when …
Continue reading "From the LHC to the FCC: why build an even bigger collider?"
One of the big themes of my project is the idea that we can learn about new physics without ever producing the new particles directly. That is exactly what Effective Field Theory (EFT) is for. In the Standard Model, we write down all the renormalisable interactions of the known particles. EFT takes a different view: …
Continue reading "Effective Field Theory and why I am using the Higgs Effective Lagrangian"
Week 5 was a mix of making the ZH selection more realistic, trying out the first non-zero Wilson coefficients, and going down a dark matter rabbit hole in lectures. Monday 27th October — Dark matter and “scintillates like a pig” This Monday’s DM lecture was a nice change of pace from fighting with Herwig cards. …
Continue reading "Week 5 – Tightening cuts, first BSM point, and a dark matter detour"
UCL Burger shop's burger, 9 quid for 3 patties not bad. This week felt like a mix of theory revision, code archaeology, and finally getting my own Rivet routine to actually run. Less “big discovery”, more slowly making the setup honest. Tuesday 21st October — Why was ZZ so big? We started with a quick …
Continue reading "Week 4 – Cross-section detective work and the Rivet Routine the goat"
Figure 1. Marble Arch is finally fixed with its ugly construction things taken out. Now it looks way better. This week had been extremely busy with master applications so Tuesday 14th October — FCC Group MeetingFirst meeting in our group, introducing: me, Jon, Tim, Wei, Lauren and Stephen. This week’s discussion mainly revisited my previous …
Well, here begins the researching of the research papers — time to find a literature-stated range for the Wilson coefficients we used (cHB and cHW). Lucky me! The second paper I picked actually includes some of the data we need. It’s titled “The Effective Standard Model after LHC Run I” by John Ellis. See the two operators that include them — …
Monday, morning meeting when I showed Jon my run3 and run4 heat maps which are somewhat interesting and because I zoomed in a bit too much in run3 so I had to do a run4 to fix it. With some human labour, we can now just about make out the edges of the contours, but …
Noot in Circle 