Tiziano Peraro, researcher in theoretical physics at the University of Bologna and member of the research project QFT@Colliders of INFN, has been awarded one of the prestigious ERC Starting Grants 2021, by the European Research Council [1].
After obtaining his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Physics and the TUM University in Munich, Tiziano worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Edinburgh, Mainz and Zurich. Since September 2020 he is researcher and teacher at the University of Bologna and INFN associate.
His scientific activity concerns the field of theoretical physics of fundamental interactions and related phenomenology, with the objective of finding the most fundamental constituents of nature – the so-called elementary particles – and understanding their interactions. His research project, for which he was granted 1.1 million euros, has the goal of developing new techniques for obtaining theoretical predictions at high precision and using them for studying the Higgs boson and the top quark.
These new predictions will be compared with high-precision measurements in high-energy scattering experiments, such as the ongoing ones at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, in Geneva. This will allow to either shed light on uncertain aspects of the Standard Model, or to find new physics, if present. The studies of Tiziano are about obtaining precise theoretical predictions, namely at a high perturbative order, especially for complex processes relevant for the LHC and involving many particles in the final state.
Tiziano developed new mathematical and computational techniques that led to huge progress in obtaining multi-loop amplitudes. Among these, finite fields and rational reconstruction techniques allow to replace complex algebraic calculations with much simpler ones involving “small” integers. Tiziano pioneered these techniques and their usage in the calculation of high-precision observables with many particles in the final state. Further development in these techniques will enable us to obtain high-precision theoretical predictions for key processes at the LHC, such as top quark pair production in association with a Higgs boson.
Tiziano’s research project will last five years and has several objectives, from the development of new cutting-edge techniques and computational methods, to the production of theoretical predictions to compare with experimental data, combining several fields of physics, mathematics and informatics. It is one of the 397 research projects (out of more than four thousand proposals) who won an ERC Starting Grant this year and the only one of these in the field of fundamental constituents of matter (PE2) hosted by an Italian institution.
[1] https://erc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/document/file/erc_2021_stg_results_all_domains.pdf