The IPPP and University of Durham has announced a job as assistant professor. Please see full details here. Deadline January 30.

We congratulate Dan, Michael and Valya for being selected for a PRD Editor's Suggestion for their recent work on QCD instantons. They improve on previous calculations and discuss how QCD instantons can be searched for at hadron colliders. You can find their work here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02287.

In a recent blogpost United Nations Global Pulse reported on a collaboration with three PhD students in Durham's physics department, the WHO, and the MIT-IBM Watson AI lab to model the impact of Covid-19 and health interventions in refugee camps. This collaboration has also been highlighted in a tweet. The students are funded by STFC through the Centre for Doctoral Training in Data-Intensive Science hosted by IPPP and ICC and their PhD research projects are in astrophysics and particle physics. They adapted a new model for the spread of epidemics developed by Durham University to the case of refugee camps.

In a remote viva Marian Heil successfully defended his PhD thesis titled "High energy corrections to the production of Higgs-boson plus dijets in QCD". Congratulations to him and all the best for his future plans in Germany! The abstract is shown here and the full thesis is here. With the expected increase in statistics provided by the LHC in the coming years it will enable experiments to explore a wider range of phase space then at present. Some of these regions require special treatment since the cross section induces large logarithms which lead to a breakdown of the perturbative series. In particular at large partonic energies the cross section of QCD processes is sensitive to BFKL–like logarithms of log |sˆ/tˆ|. The Monte Carlo generator High Energy Jets (HEJ) resums log |sˆ/tˆ| through an expansion of the matrix element and a numerical integration of the phase space. This thesis will develop a completely new matching of HEJ with leading-order calculations, which allows...

After 15 years as a member of the IPPP Ruth Gregory has accepted the position of Head of Department at Kings College London. The IPPP congratulates Ruth on her appointment and wishes her all the best in her new role, which she will take on in very challenging times! King's College announcement

Our PhD student Giuseppe De Laurentis completed his PhD after defended it in a remote viva. Congratulations to him and all the best for his postdoc in Freiburg! His thesis title is "Numerical techniques for analytical high-multiplicity scattering amplitudes". The abstract is shown here and the full thesis is here. Abstract: In this thesis we employ generalised unitarity methods to compute high-multiplicity one-loop scattering amplitudes in quantum chromodynamics, and leverage the scattering equations to obtain high-multiplicity tree-level amplitudes in higher-derivative theories. We develop a set of numerical strategies, based on the study of singular limits in complex phase space and on the reconstruction of generic ansatze, to obtain compact analytical spinor expressions from numerical evaluations only. The advantages of analytical expressions for scattering amplitudes include faster evaluation and increased numerical stability in soft and collinear limits. Thus, they provide a...

We congratulate Valery Khoze, Misha Ryskin and Marek Taševský for completing a new review on 'High energy soft QCD and Diffraction' as part of Particle Data Group's 2020 edition. You can find the review here http://pdg.lbl.gov/2020/reviews/contents_sports.html.

We congratulate Philip Waite for having received the departmental Alan Martin Doctoral prize. The prize is awarded to a postgraduate student for the best Ph.D. thesis in Physics in a given year. During his PhD, Phil has published on research projects related to precision calculations for collider processes, searches for new physics and the development of novel machine learning techniques (http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/13418/1/Philip_Waite_thesis.pdf?DDD25+).

Our PhD student Joey Reiness completed his PhD and defended it in a remote viva this week. Congratulations to him! His thesis is titled Pieces of the Higgsaw and its abstract is below. The full thesis is also attached, here. ABSTRACT: The discovery of a 125 GeV scalar boson at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 sparked at least as many questions as it answered. The Higgs boson is unique in being the only known fundamental scalar particle, which makes it compelling in a variety of contexts. As the field of Higgs physics has developed and aged, this era-defining boson has crept into relevance throughout all areas of high-energy physics. This thesis looks at the Higgs boson and its potential properties in three different regimes: The first focuses on how measurements of Higgs interactions at particle colliders can be used to discern and identify signs of new physics. A novel analysis method is presented, which uses differential observables to constrain the effects of higher-energy...

Following a recent measurement of the T2K Collaboration, in a Nature News and Views article Silvia Pascoli and Jessica Turner have discussed the question whether CP violation in the lepton sector can be a key ingredient to the matter-antimatter asymmetry in our Universe:https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01000-9?utm_source=feedburner... For the T2K report see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2177-0

Some of the ressources of the IPPP Computer Cluster are donated to the GridPP support for simulating the dynamics of COVID-19 proteins through the distributed computing project Folding@Home. Since the start of the COVID-19 crisis, the support for Folding@Home has passed 1.5ExaFlops; the GridPP contribution will be significant. Links:https://foldingathome.org/2020/03/15/coronavirus-what-were-doing-and-how...https://www.gridpp.ac.uk/https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/246309

One of our Durham Data intense science CDT PhD students Joe Bullock co-authored an overview of recent studies using ML/AI to tackle many aspects of the COVID-19 crisis at different scales. The review can be found here

The Royal Society Biographical Memoir of James Stirling, the Founding Director of the IPPP, can be accessed here.

After nearly five years at the helm of the IPPP Keith Ellis stepped down from his post as Director on the 31st of December 2019. All IPPP members would like to thank Keith for his tireless efforts leading the institute and raising its recognition nationally and internationally. Keith will continue to be one of IPPP's active members and a professor of the University of Durham. From the beginning of the year Michael Spannowsky will take over the Director post and will be supported by Daniel Maître as Deputy Director.