Z+jet production at the LHC: Electroweak radiative corrections

The investigation of weak bosons $V$ ($V=\mathrm{W}^{\pm}$, $\mathrm{Z}$) produced with or without associated hard QCD jets will be of great phenomenological interest at the LHC. Owing to the large cross sections and the clean decay signatures of the vector bosons, weak-boson production can be used to monitor and calibrate the luminosity of the collider, to constrain the PDFs, or to calibrate the detector. Moreover, the $Z$+jet(s) final state constitutes an important background to a large variety of signatures of physics beyond the Standard Model. To match the excellent experimental accuracy that is expected at the LHC, we have worked out a theoretical next-to-leading-order analysis of $V$+jet production at hadron colliders. The focus of this talk will be on new results on the full electroweak corrections to $Z(\to l^-l^+)$+jet production at the LHC. All off-shell effects are included in our approach, and the finite lifetime of the $Z$ boson is consistently accounted for using the complex-mass scheme. In the following, we briefly introduce the calculation and discuss selected phenomenological implications of our results.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, talk at the "35th International Conference on High Energy Physics", Paris, France, July 22 -- 28, 201

Electroweak corrections to W-boson pair production at the LHC

Vector-boson pair production ranks among the most important Standard-Model benchmark processes at the LHC, not only in view of on-going Higgs analyses. These processes may also help to gain a deeper understanding of the electroweak interaction in general, and to test the validity of the Standard Model at highest energies. In this work, the first calculation of the full one-loop electroweak corrections to on-shell W-boson pair production at hadron colliders is presented. We discuss the impact of the corrections on the total cross section as well as on relevant differential distributions. We observe that corrections due to photon-induced channels can be amazingly large at energies accessible at the LHC, while radiation of additional massive vector bosons does not influence the results significantly.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figures, 4 tables; some references and comments on \gamma\gamma -> WW added; matches version published in JHE

Report of the Snowmass 2013 energy frontier QCD working group

This is the summary report of the energy frontier QCD working group prepared for Snowmass 2013. We review the status of tools, both theoretical and experimental, for understanding the strong interactions at colliders. We attempt to prioritize important directions that future developments should take. Most of the efforts of the QCD working group concentrate on proton-proton colliders, at 14 TeV as planned for the next run of the LHC, and for 33 and 100 TeV, possible energies of the colliders that will be necessary to carry on the physics program started at 14 TeV. We also examine QCD predictions and measurements at lepton-lepton and lepton-hadron colliders, and in particular their ability to improve our knowledge of strong coupling constant and parton distribution functions.Comment: 62 pages, 31 figures, Snowmass community summer study 201

Active automata learning in practice: An annotated bibliography of the years 2011 to 2016

Active automata learning is slowly becoming a standard tool in the toolbox of the software engineer. As systems become ever more complex and development becomes more distributed, inferred models of system behavior become an increasingly valuable asset for understanding and analyzing a system’s behavior. Five years ago (in 2011) we have surveyed the then current state of active automata learning research and applications of active automata learning in practice. We predicted four major topics to be addressed in the then near future: efficiency, expressivity of models, bridging the semantic gap between formal languages and analyzed components, and solutions to the inherent problem of incompleteness of active learning in black-box scenarios. In this paper we review the progress that has been made over the past five years, assess the status of active automata learning techniques with respect to applications in the field of software engineering, and present an updated agenda for future research