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SUMMARY:Parton Distributions in the Higgs Boson Era - Dr Juan Rojo\, CERN
DTSTART:20130604T143000Z
DTEND:20130604T151000Z
UID:TALK45559@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Leona Hope-Coles
DESCRIPTION:With the recent discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC\, part
 icle physics has entered a new era\, where it is of utmost importance to p
 rovide accurate theoretical predictions for all relevant high energy proce
 sses. Crucial ingredients of these predictions are  the Parton Distributio
 n Functions\, which encode the non-perturbative dynamics determining how t
 he proton's energy is split among its constituents\, quarks and gluons. To
  bypass the drawbacks of traditional analyses\, a novel approach to PDF de
 termination has recently been proposed\, based on artificial neural networ
 ks\, machine learning techniques and genetic algorithms. In this approach\
 ,  PDFs are "learnt" from data without imposing a prior theory\, and they 
 "adapt" towards the physically meaningful solution\, in the spirit of biol
 ogical evolution. In this talk we introduce pedagogically the concept of p
 arton distributions\, motivate their relevant for LHC phenomenology and de
 scribe the latest developments of PDF determinations\, including the const
 raints from LHC data\, PDFs with electroweak corrections\, theory uncertai
 nties on PDFs\, and PDFs for New Physics searches.
LOCATION:Small Lecture Theatre\, Cavendish Laboratory\, Department of Phys
 ics
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