Perturbative QCD Study for Jet and Heavy Flavor Production

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This award funds the research activities of Professor Zhongbo Kang at the University of California, Los Angeles.After nearly twenty years of planning and construction, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is now the highest-energy particle collider in the world. By colliding elementary particles against each other at high energies, physicists expect to learn about the fundamental building blocks of matter and their interactions at higher energies and smaller distances than have ever been previously explored. Collimated jets of hadrons are a dominant feature of high-energy particle interactions, and are copiously produced at the LHC. The research of Professor Kang is focused on understanding the production of these strongly interacting particles, from which important information can be extracted. Jets constitute unique opportunities to explore the dynamics of the strong interaction and to study the fundamental properties of the underlying theory, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). As a result, research in this area advances the national interest by promoting the progress of science in one of its most fundamental directions: the discovery and understanding of new physical law. This project is also envisioned to have significant broader impacts. Professor Kang will involve graduate students in his research, and thereby provide critical training for junior physicists beginning research in this field. He also intends to give public lectures on his research results, and develop new course curricula based on results from the LHC.More technically, Professor Kang will develop theoretical tools to perform accurate QCD phenomenology at the LHC, especially for inclusive and heavy flavor tagged jets and their substructure. He will also perform studies for heavy quarkonium production by making use of a novel fragmentation function approach within QCD factorization. In addition, he will combine the frameworks of heavy quarkonium physics and jet substructure in order to achieve a better understanding of the production and polarization of heavy quarkonium at the LHC, which is currently one of the most intriguing puzzles in the field.