Research Interests
I am interested in exploring the physical world at the most fundamental level by studying the smallest indivisible building blocks of matter and their interactions at high-energy particle accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. The observations made at these colliders and their interpretations provide insights into the strong and electroweak interactions of the constituents of matter (leptons and quarks), of particles mediating these fundamental forces (photon, W and Z bosons and gluon), and, since recently, also of the Higgs boson. The first run of the LHC, from 2009 to 2012, culminated with the discovery of the Higgs boson announced on July 4, 2012. This discovery led to the award of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics to Francois Englert and Peter Higgs for the prediction of this particle over 50 years ago. The Higgs boson was the last missing building block completing the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. The SM successfully describes essentially all subatomic experimental phenomena, and has proven to be extremely robust against all experimental tests. But it cannot account for dark matter, and it leaves many conceptual puzzles unexplained. Therefore, one of the main goals of the LHC is the search for signals of new physics, i.e. phenomena not described by the SM, which may provide solutions to some of these puzzles. To be able to make more discoveries at the LHC, predictions for SM processes have to be under superb theoretical control, at least at the level of the experimental precision. This implies the need for highly complex calculations in Quantum Field Theory, which very often require the development of new techniques at the forefront of this research field and the implementation in (or combination with) Monte Carlo event generators used in the experimental analysis. My research goal is to provide these calculations and Monte Carlo programs so that we can take full advantage of the potential of the LHC for discovering new physics.