High Energy Seminar

Understanding perturbative QCD through single-top-quark production

Dr. Zach Sullivan
Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne, Illinois

Tuesday, October 24, 2006    4:00 p.m. NSH 415

Single-top-quark production provides an exciting test-bed for our understanding of both the Standard Model, and subtleties of perturbative QCD.  The discovery of this process at Run II of the Tevatron will provide a direct measure of the CKM matrix element V_tb, and may lead to the discovery of new physics.  In order to reach that discovery, however, we have had to advance our general theoretical understanding of next-to-leading order calculations and their interpretation in a collider environment.  In this talk I will discuss how single-top-quark production has led to new insights into problems with multiple scales, parton distribution uncertainties, modeling of jet distributions, and calculation of exclusive final states; and what this implies for the connections between theory and experiment.