My name is Lance Dixon. I'm a theoretical
physicist at SLAC. I've worked at SLAC
for 30 years and I've been interested in
exactly how particles behave when we
smash them together in giant particle
accelerators.
 
Theorists love formulas even more than they love coffee.
This mug has a formula for the standard
model. The standard model tells us what
happens when we smash elementary
particles together in giant particle
accelerators.
Narrator: Like detectives
experimenters analyze the particle
debris created in the powerful
collisions and reconstruct what exactly
happened. From the collision data
theorists build mathematical models.
This brings us to another formula known as
the energy energy correlation or EEC. The
EEC measures how much energy in the form
of particles goes into two detectors
placed at a specific angle to each other.
The result provides key experimental
evidence for the behavior of quarks, the
particles that make up protons and
neutrons.
Dixon: So for particle colliders with
electrons, and their antimatter siblings
positrons, we've known since the 1970s
how to write a formula for the most
important contribution to this energy energy correlation.
Narrator: Now Lance Dixon
along with former postdoc Hua Xing Zhu and
collaborators have figured out the
formula for the biggest correction to EEC
in decades. It's a formula their paper
calls "remarkably simple," so simple in
fact Lance offered to write it down...
Dixon: Now we gotta go to the next board...
Formulas are important because they shed light on certain situations where
numerical approximations fail. For
example, with our new formula we can
study carefully the situation in which
two particles fly out almost back to
back, or the opposite situation where
they come out very close to each other
in a narrow bundle of particles called a
jet. Both situations are very important
for electron-positron collisions
but the second one is particularly
important for collisions at the Large
Hadron Collider, the world's most
powerful particle accelerator. It
produces huge numbers of jets.
Narrator: Mathematical models like EEC tell
physicists what to expect from particle
collisions, and knowing what to expect is
the key to knowing when a collision has
created something unexpected. With this,
researchers can better understand how
energy is distributed in jets, more
accurately measure the strong nuclear
force, or even help discover new
particles. No matter what, it will help us
better understand the world on its most
fundamental level.
