The IPPP mourns the sudden loss of Graham Ross. Graham was an exceptional scientist of international renown and a kingpin of theoretical physics in the UK. He was well known for his outstanding intellect and brilliant ideas, and was a beacon to many in the community. Those of us lucky enough to have interacted with him will be able to recall moments of forensic examination (and occasional complete deconstruction) of ideas, as well as a his playful sense of humour, which often left a lasting impression: that this was the way physics should be done. Over the years he became a long-time friend and supporter of IPPP and frequent visitor. He will be sorely missed.

We congratulate Andrew Blance for defending his PhD thesis. For his PhD, Andrew developed novel (quantum) machine learning methods to search for new physics in LHC data. Thus, his work is based on cross disciplinary research between the IPPP and the Institute for Data Science (https://www.dur.ac.uk/idas/).

Congratulation to Joseph Aylett-Bullock who has completed his PhD after a remote defence. His thesis, titled “Colliding Worlds: Modern methods for amplitude computations and responding to crisis situations”, was based on his cross disciplinary research within the Institute for Data Science (https://www.dur.ac.uk/idas/) and the IPPP.

This is a great success for the particle physics community (https://news.fnal.gov/2021/04/first-results-from-fermilabs-muon-g-2-expe...)! The IPPP is very proud that Alan Martin has contributed to establishing the Standard Model prediction for g-2 that evidences a deviation from the experimentally observed value (https://arxiv.org/abs/1105.3149).

Our PhD student James Whitehead has completed his PhD after defended it in a remote viva. Congratulations to him! His thesis title is "The Production of Pairs of Isolated Photons at Higher Orders in QCD". The abstract is shown here and the full thesis is attached to this post here. Abstract: In this thesis, we consider the corrections to the production of a pair of isolated photons at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which arise at Next-to-Next-to-Leading-Order (NNLO) in QCD, and Next-to-Leading-Order (NLO) in the electroweak theory. These corrections are calculated through the antenna subtraction formalism, and implemented in the parton-level Monte Carlo program NNLOjet. This calculation is then applied to a study of the theoretical and phenomenological issues which drive the apparent tension between prior theoretical predictions at this order, and LHC data taken with the Atlas detector at 8 TeV. In particular, we focus upon the issue of photon isolation, presenting the first...

We congratulate Maura for officially receiving her PhD today! Her work was on the intersectional field of neutrino and astroparticle physics, with the title 'Probing BSM Physics with CP-violation, Neutrinos and White Dwarfs'.

Congratulations to Alan Price who officially received his PhD! His thesis titled "Precision Simulations for Future Colliders" is attached to this news item here and the abstract can be read in the full text. We wish him all the best for his post-doctoral position in Siegen. Future particle colliders will usher in a new era of precision physics. It will be crucial that the theory community can provide highly precise predictions for these experiments. In particular, for future e+e− colliders the theoretical calculations will need to improve by a factor 2-100, depending on the observable. In this thesis, we will present the theoretical improvements implemented in the SHERPA event generator for e+e− physics. We will concentrate on the treatment of QED radiation within the framework of Yennie, Frautschi and Suura resummation and discuss its impact on future colliders. In particular, we shall show how initial state radiation can be resummed in a process-independent manner to all...