Blog on my journey in High Energy Physics
Right. Contur. After several posts of saying “we’ll get to Contur next”, I should probably actually get to Contur. By this stage, I had a working Rivet analysis, simulated Higgs events, and a procedure for comparing signal and background. What I did not have was an FCC measurement. Mainly because the collider has not been …
Continue reading "Finally, Contur: making measurements for a collider that hasn’t run yet"
Believe it or not, I actually have some drafts. I was just way too lazy to post them... Continuing from the Contur cliffhanger... Not yet. Before getting to Contur, there is one part of the project I need to catch up on: what happened to the original plan of changing Higgs interactions and looking for …
First, sorry for the delay. I was busy and lazy at the same time : ( But here is a cool figure from ATLAS to get us started. Figure 1. ATLAS event display of a candidate Higgs decay into four muons, H → ZZ* → 4μ, recorded on 10 June 2012. Image credit: ATLAS Collaboration, …
Continue reading "Yearly Catch up: a Higgs candidate is only half the story"
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 …
