The phenomenology group at the University of Florence is interested in several aspects of the phenomenology of elementary particles in the Standard Model and Beyond. The LHC experiment is presently shedding light on the next energy frontier in physics, 10^12 eV. This requires precise theoretical computations to extract physical informations from the experiment. The main goal will then be to determine the nature of electro-weak symmetry breaking in the SM and uncover the physics associated to the Higgs boson.

Physics Beyond the Standard Model

The Standard Model is arguably the most successful theory to date describing all we know about elementary particles and their interactions. The recent discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC, completing the degrees of freedom of the SM predicted long ago, has been the last big triumph. Despite these successes the SM is known to be incomplete for theoretical and phenomenological reasons and new degrees of freedom must exist. LHC has in this regard the best chances to find new physics due to the naturalness problem in the SM that hints to new dynamics at the TeV scale. 

Our group is broadly interested in all the physics beyond the SM that is necessary to address the many shortcomings of the SM.

The main present interests are:

• Electro-weak physics: composite Higgs models, new approaches to the hierarchy problem, new strong dynamics. 
• Collider physics: experimental signatures of composite Higgs models, top partners, vector resonances.
• Flavor physics beyond the SM
• Dark Matter: WIMPS and axions
• Strong Dynamics and supersymmetry

QCD and Particle Physics Phenomenology at High Energies

The research activity aims at improving the understanding of strong interactions at short distances (in regimes of high energies and large transferred momenta) and at providing accurate theoretical predictions for particle physics phenomenology (within and beyond the Standard Model) at high-energy accelerators. The group has a wide expertise on both theoretical and phenomenological aspects.

Topics of current interest include:  

• methods for the computations of QCD radiative corrections at the next-to-leading order (NLO) and the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO)
• high-precision physics for hard-scattering processes in hadron collisions and at the LHC (production of Higgs bosons, vector bosons, high-$p_t$ jets and photons, heavy quarks, supersymmetric particles)
• small-x physics in DIS and high-energy QCD factorization of heavy-quarks and jet production in DIS and hadron-hadron collisions
• infrared (soft and collinear) structure of multiparticle scattering amplitudes in gauge theories and factorization issues in QCD 
• theoretical developments and phenomenological applications of all-order QCD resummations of logarithmically-enhanced radiative corrections