Effective Field Theories for the LHC

Abstract

In this thesis I study applications of effective field theories to understand aspects of QCD jets and their substructure at the Large Hadron Collider. In particular, I introduce an observable, $D_2$, which can be used for distinguishing boosted $W/Z/H$ bosons from the QCD background using information about the radiation pattern within the jet, and perform a precision calculation of this observable. To simplify calculations in the soft collinear effective theory, I also develop a helicity operator basis, which facilitates matching calculations to fixed order computations performed using spinor-helicity techniques, and demonstrate its utility by computing an observable relevant for studying the properties of the newly discovered Higgs boson.

Ph.D. thesis, MIT, May 2016, 501 pages, 180 figures