HIPFLAPP: High Precision Flavoured Particle Production at the Large Hadron Collider

The project will develop and exploit theoretical calculations to study particle collisions that feature heavy flavours, namely the charm quark and beauty quark, at the Large Hadron Collider.

Identifying heavy quarks is critical to pinpoint specific scattering processes and reject backgrounds, resulting in an unique opportunity to probe the structure of the proton, to improve our understanding of the Higgs mechanism and to possibly unveil the presence of new physics signals in the LHC data.

On the theoretical side, the accuracy and the precision of phenomenological predictions must be increased to keep up with the progressively smaller uncertainty on experimental measurements, so that reliable comparisons with experimental data can be performed.

More specifically, the project will focus on very accurate computations in quantum chromodynamics to better describe the production of flavoured particles across a wide kinematic range, so that no region of phase-space is left unexplored: these theory predictions will require a combination of both fixed-order and all-order perturbative calculations in the strong coupling constant.

A public code with the implementation of the predictions for heavy hadron production at ultimate precision will be assembled, hence providing other researchers in theoretical physics and the experimental collaborations with a valuable tool in the LHC precision era.