Large Effects from Small QCD Instantons: Making Soft Bombs at Hadron Colliders

Khoze, Valentin V.; Krauss, Frank; Schott, Matthias

Abstract

It is a common belief that the last missing piece of the Standard Model of particles physics was found with the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. However, there remains a major prediction of quantum tunnelling processes mediated by instanton solutions in the Yang-Mills theory, that is still untested in the Standard Model. The direct experimental observation of instanton-induced processes, which are a consequence of the non-trivial vacuum structure of the Standard Model and of quantum tunnelling in QFT, would be a major breakthrough in modern particle physics. In this paper, we present for the first time a full calculation of QCD instanton-induced processes in proton-proton collisions accounting for quantum corrections due to both initial and final state gluon interactions, a first implementation in an MC event generator as well as a basic strategy how to observe these effects experimentally.

Citation

Khoze, V. V., Krauss, F., & Schott, M. (2020). Large Effects from Small QCD Instantons: Making Soft Bombs at Hadron Colliders. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2020(4), Article 201. https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep04%282020%29201

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Apr 9, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Apr 29, 2020
• Publication Date: Apr 30, 2020
• Deposit Date: Nov 28, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: May 7, 2020
• Journal: Journal of High Energy Physics
• Print ISSN: 1126-6708
• Electronic ISSN: 1029-8479
• Publisher: Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 2020
• Issue: 4
• Article Number: 201
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep04%282020%29201
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1282242