Theoretical Physics to Face the Challenge of LHC

Abstract This book is based on lectures at the Les Houches Summer School held in August 2011 for an audience of advanced graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in particle physics, theoretical physics, and cosmology—areas where new experimental results were on the verge of being discovered at CERN. The school was held during a summer of great anticipation that at any moment contact might be made with the most recent theories of the nature of the fundamental forces and the structure of spacetime. In fact, during the session, the long anticipated discovery of the Higgs particle was announced. The book vividly describes the creative diversity and tension within the community of theoreticians who have split into several components—those doing phenomenology and those dealing with highly theoretical problems—with a few trying to bridge both domains. The theoreticians covered many directions in the theory of elementary particles, from classics such as the supersymmetric Standard Model to very recent ideas such as the relation between black holes, hydrodynamics, and gauge/gravity duality. The experimentalists explained in detail how intensively and precisely the LHC has verified the theoretical predictions of the Standard Model, predictions that were at the frontline of experimental discovery during the 1970s to 1990s, and how the LHC is ready to make new discoveries. They described many of the ingenious and pioneering techniques developed at CERN for the detection and data analysis of billions of billions of proton–proton collisions.