Implementation of Precision Parton Shower Physics into the Herwig Event Generator for LHC Simulation

In high energy physics we are usually interested in interactions between partons (quarks and gluons) with high momentum transfer, producing new particles like the Higgs boson or supersymmetric partners, or more familiar ones like the top quark. These decay to produce further partons. However, partons cannot propagate freely but are confined into hadrons, the particles that interact with the detectors around the collision region.

This process by which a few hard partons evolve into a system of hundreds of hadrons is far too complicated to calculate analytically and must be modelled numerically, with Monte Carlo techniques. Any attempt to understand the data from the LHC or other high energy collider experiments would be completely impossible without Monte Carlo event generators that simulate them.

The Herwig event generator is one of only three used to simulate events at the LHC and other high energy particle physics experiments.

A key component of these event generators is the algorithm to evolve the partons produced in the high momentum transfer collision down to the energy scale where they produce hadrons, called a parton shower algorithm. Great progress in the theoretical understanding of parton shower physics has been made over the last ten years and the main aim of this PhD project is to use that understanding to improve the precision of Herwig's parton shower algorithm and thereby the accuracy of its simulation of LHC events.