Lectures on LHC Physics

TL;DR

This paper provides an overview of LHC physics, focusing on the Higgs sector, QCD relevance, and background knowledge, aiming to educate graduate students and researchers for understanding and engaging with LHC research.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive, accessible set of lecture notes on LHC physics topics, including Higgs physics and QCD, tailored for students and researchers entering the field.

Findings

Clarifies key concepts in Higgs physics and QCD for LHC analysis.

Serves as an educational resource for graduate students and researchers.

Includes updated content to aid understanding of current LHC results.

Abstract

With the discovery of the Higgs boson the LHC experiments have closed the most important gap in our understanding of fundamental interactions. We now know that the interactions between elementary particles can be described by quantum field theory, more specifically by a renormalizable gauge theory. This theory is valid to arbitrarily high energy scales and do not require an ultraviolet completion. In these notes I cover three aspects to help understand LHC results in the Higgs sector and in searches for physics beyond the Standard Model: many facets of Higgs physics, QCD as it is relevant for LHC measurements, and standard phenomenological background knowledge. The lectures should put young graduate students into a position to really follow advanced writeups and first research papers. In that sense they can serve as a starting point for a research project in LHC physics. With this new, significantly expanded version I am confident that also some more senior colleagues will find them useful and interesting.