The three-loop splitting functions in QCD

by Andreas Vogt (NIKHEF)

Friday 11 Jun 2004, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Auditorium (CERN)

For the next decade, the high-energy frontier of particle physics will be at colliders with proton beams, especially the LHC. At such machines, quantitative studies of the standard model and of (un-)expected new particles require a precise understanding of the partonic luminosities and of the QCD corrections to the corresponding cross-sections. For many important processes, like Higgs production, the second-order QCD effects need to be taken into account. Very recently, a milestone has been reached: the computation of the corresponding three-loop splitting functions governing the evolution of the parton distributions. We discuss why this huge and difficult calculation was necessary, what it took to complete it, and where it leads to.