Probing New Physics at the Large Hadron Collider: the Effective Field Theory Pathway

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is hunting for signs of New Physics (NP) in the vast amount of data collected by its experiments.

If new states are heavier than the collider energy reach, their presence can be revealed by modifications of the interactions of the known particles.

The Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) parametrises such deviations from the SM, extending the sensitivity to scales beyond those directly probed at colliders.

Determining the parameters of the EFT will shed light on the nature of NP and will provide hints to the most important questions in particle physics, such as the shape of the Higgs potential, its relation to electroweak baryogenesis and the amount of CP-violation and its connection to the matter-anti-matter asymmetry.

A dedicated campaign of measurements and their SMEFT interpretation is a major goal of the LHC and requires coordination between experimentalists and theorists.

I aim at making essential beyond the state-of-the-art theoretical contributions to the LHC SMEFT programme by: 1) Providing the first fully generic next-to-leading order QCD and electroweak Monte Carlo implementation of SMEFT operators, to allow theorists and experimentalists to perform realistic simulations. 2) Combining accurate SMEFT predictions with LHC data to constrain the operators through a novel robust global determination.

The findings, particularly if different from the SM expectations, will point to the scale and nature of NP. 3) Exploring new challenging proposals, such as i) the impact of operator running and mixing and ii) the optimisation of ways of extracting the Higgs self-coupling and probing CP-violation at the LHC, two topics with profound implications for our theoretical understanding of particle physics.

The proposal plays to a key strength of my research expertise and my research record uniquely positions me to successfully lead this ambitious project, which is vital to exploit the full LHC potential.