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Last modified: Mon Apr 12 21:11:53 CEST 2010

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Winter Workshop on Recent QCD Advances at the LHC

Les Houches, February 13th - 18th, 2011


workshop description

with the recent startup of operation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the physics of the strong interaction, described by the theory of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), explores a new territory in proton-proton (p-p) and nucleus-nucleus (Pb-Pb) collisions at energies never reached before. The topics of the workshop will be organised around the following axes:

perturbative QCD:

the study of the production of particles with high-p_T and/or large mass such as hard partons (jets), prompt photons, heavy-quarks, quarkonia or Drell-Yan pairs allows one to test perturbative QCD in its diverse approaches: collinear-factorization, k_T-factorization, colour-dipole, various logarithmic resummation techniques ... In addition one obtains valuable information about non-perturbative objects such as the parton distribution functions (PDFs) in the proton and nuclei, and parton-to-hadron fragmentation functions (FFs) in the "QCD vacuum" and "medium". matching of parton-shower Monte Carlos to fixed-order NLO approaches and perturbative calculations beyond NLO are also hot topics relevant to LHC phenomenology.

QCD in the non-perturbative regime:

an important fraction of observables in high-energy hadronic collisions ("minimum bias" multiplicity, low p_T spectra, soft diffractive scattering, "underlying event", ...) can still not be calculated within first-principles QCD. the first LHC data will be collected under luminosity conditions that will allow one to study these large cross-section processes in detail. such non-perturbative phenomena are interesting in their own right as well as backgrounds for new-physics signals.

low-x QCD:

at LHC energies, the values of the parton fractional momentum x=p_parton/p_proton probed in hadronic collisions can be as low as 10^{-6}. In such low-x regime, the effects of high parton density leading to effects such as gluon saturation and multi-parton interactions, particularly enhanced with nuclear targets, are expected to dominate the bulk of particle production. semi-hard particle production will allows us to test the boundaries of the applicability of perturbative QCD in the region where low-x gluon saturation phenomena become increasingly important.

workshop goals

The expected outcomes of this winter meeting are:

  • to consolidate the European and international community involved in the physics of the strong interaction,
  • to share experimental and theoretical tools which are basic for the interpretation of the QCD data at the LHC,
  • to promote the contacts among theorists and experimentalists,
  • to strengthen the connection between the proton-proton and nucleus-nucleus communities at the LHC