High-Precision global analysis of color-free lhc processes at small recoil
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN collides protons at the highest energies. With the large datasets from Run 2 and the further increase expected from Run 3, the precision of LHC measurements will significantly improve over the next years. Color-free processes (for which the final state of the hard interaction is color neutral) are of central importance to several high-priority areas of the LHC precision physics program. Prominent examples are measurements of the W-boson mass, of the couplings of the Higgs boson, and searches for the elusive dark matter particles.

The key innovation of COLORFREE will be to combine many different color-free processes in a new type of global analysis in which the dominant theory uncertainties are either eliminated or constrained by the data itself, thereby improving the theoretical precision up to an order of magnitude to the 1-2% level. In doing so, COLORFREE will unlock the full potential of existing and future precision measurements of color-free processes.

This will be achieved 1) by exploiting and further developing a groundbreaking new method to reliably quantify perturbative theory uncertainties and their correlations, which was recently developed by the PI, and 2) by developing innovative new effective-field theory methods to account for all effects that are relevant at this precision but have been neglected so far.

Important outcomes of COLORFREE will be:

1) Determinations of fundamental parameters at the highest possible precision, and stringent tests for possible effects beyond the Standard Model.

2) A new type of precision theory predictions with built-in uncertainties and correlations, which will solve a long-standing problem at the interface of theory and experiment. In particular, precision measurements often avoid theory limitations by relying on theory uncertainties to cancel between different control and signal regions, but until now have had no means to reliably quantify the remaining theory uncertainties.