QCD

Abstract

Just as Sect. 1 is not meant to be a complete introduction to electroweak symmetry breaking but is aimed at introducing the aspects of Higgs physics most relevant to the LHC this section cannot cover the entire field of QCD. Instead, we will focus on QCD as it impacts LHC physics, like for example the Higgs searches discussed in the first part of the lecture.

Further Reading

Just like the Higgs part, the QCD part of these lecture notes is something in between a text book chapter and a review of QCD and mostly focused on LHC searches. I cut some corners, in particular when calculations do not affect the main topic, namely the resummation of logarithms in QCD and the physical meaning of these logarithms. There is no point in giving a list of original references, but I will list a few books and review articles which should come in handy if you would like to know more:

• I started learning high energy theory including QCD from Otto Nachtmann’s book. I still use his appendices for Feynman rules because I have not seen another book with as few (if not zero) typos [15].

• Similar, but maybe a little more modern is the Standard Model primer by Cliff Burgess and Guy Moore [2]. At the end of it you will find more literature.

• The best source to learn QCD at colliders is the pink book by Keith Ellis, James Stirling, and Bryan Webber [7]. It includes everything you ever wanted to know about QCD and more. This QCD section essentially follows its Chap. 5.

• A little more phenomenology you can find in Günther Dissertori, Ian Knowles and Michael Schmelling’s book [6]. Again, I borrowed some of the discussions in the QCD section from there. In the same direction but more theory oriented is the QCD book by Ioffe, Fadin, and Lipatov [13].

• If you would like to learn how to for example compute higher order cross sections to Drell–Yan production, Rick Field works it all out [10].

• For those of you who are now hooked on QCD and jet physics at hadron colliders there are two comprehensive reviews by Steve Ellis et al. [8] and Gavin Salam [18].

• Aimed more at perturbative QCD at the LHC is the QCD primer by John Campbell, Joey Huston, and James Stirling [3].

• Coming to the usual brilliant TASI lectures, there are Dave Soper’s [20] and George Sterman’s [22] notes. Both of them do not exactly use my kind of notations and are comparably formal, but they are a great read if you know something about QCD already. More on the phenomenological side there are Mike Seymour’s lecture notes [19].

• For a more complete discussion of the Catani–Seymour dipoles the very brief discussion in this writeup should allow you to follow the original long paper [4].

• The only review on leading order jet merging is by Michelangelo Mangano and Tim Stelzer [14]. The original CKKW paper beautifully explains the general idea for final state radiation, and I follow their analysis [5]. For other approaches there is a very concise discussion included with the comparison of the different models [1].

• To understand MC@NLO there is nothing like the original papers by Bryan Webber and Stefano Frixione [11].

• The POWHEG method is really nicely described in the original paper by Paolo Nason [16]. Different processes you can find discussed in detail in a later paper by Stefano Frixione, Paolo Nason, and Carlo Oleari [12].

• Even though they are just hand written and do not include a lot of text it might be useful to have a look at Michael Spira’s QCD lecture notes [21] to view some of the topics from a different angle.