QCD uncertainties at the LHC and the implications of HERA

Abstract

Strong interaction physics will be ubiquitous at the Large Hadron Collider since the colliding beams consist of confined quarks and gluons. Although the main purpose of the LHC is to study the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking and to search for physics beyond the Standard Model, to maximise the precision and sensitivity of such anaylses it is necessary to understand in detail various perturbative, semi-perturbative and non-perturbative QCD effects. Many of these effects have been extensively studied at HERA and will be studied further at HERA II. We discuss the impact of the knowledge thus gained on physics at the LHC.

Contributed to the Proceedings of DIS04, Strbske Pleso, Slovakia