Lectures on "The Infrared Structure of Gauge Theories"

Dates

1–12 February 2010

Location

ETH Hönggerberg, Building HIL, lecture room HIT K 52

For information about how to get to the ETH Hönggerberg, please consult the site information page of ETH Zürich.

Time

11.00 - 12.45 h

Overview

In recent years, an impressive progress has been made in unravelling the infrared (IR) structure of gauge theories in perturbation theory. Factorization theorems and gauge invariance have been exploited to constrain the form of scattering amplitudes both in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) and Supersymmetric Yang-Mills (SYM) theories. Notably, predictions for N=4 SYM have been confirmed with a different approach based on the AdS/CFT duality.

These IR techniques have important applications. First of all factorization is the crucial property that makes it possible to compute any physical quantity at hadron colliders. Moreover, the knowledge of the IR structure of QCD has lead to relevant progress in the all-order analytical calculation (resummation) of logarithmically enhanced contributions to physical observables, to the improvement of jet-clustering algorithms, and is the basic building block of parton shower event generators, which are currently used to simulate actual events at hadron colliders. This broad overview is completed by a very recent development, namely the Soft-Collinear Effective Theory (SCET), the effective theory relevant for processes involving large energies and small invariant masses. SCET allows one to study soft-collinear factorization on the operator level and to resum logarithmically enhanced contributions to cross sections using renormalization group (RG) evolution in the effective theory.

>>>Program and speakers

The lectures will be addressing PhD and master students, as well more senior researchers who would like to learn about the progress in the field.

Organization

Babis Anastasiou, Andrea Banfi, Aude Gehrmann, Thomas Gehrmann, Zoltan Kunszt

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