Abstract

The large amount of high-quality measurements presented by the experimental collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) provides an invaluable source of our understanding of elementary particles. It is of paramount importance to dispose of accurate theoretical calculations to be compared with the increasingly precise experimental data. One of the limiting factors in the accuracy of any theoretical prediction at the LHC is the uncertainty on Parton Distribution Functions (PDFs). The latter provide information of the proton’s content in terms of its elementary constituents, quarks and gluons. A further limiting factor, which concerns a phenomenologically relevant subset of predictions, is the theoretical ambiguity that arises when dealing with processes involving heavy quarks. In this seminar both points are thoroughly addressed. In the first part of the seminar, a novel method for an accurate and statistically-sound determination of PDFs is described. In the second part, a recent analysis, which sheds light on a number of puzzles concerning bottom-initiated processes at the LHC , is presented.