Stella Schindler: Diffraction from effective field theory

Monday 26 May 2025, 15:00 → 16:00 Europe/Berlin

SR2

Over the next decade, new and upgraded accelerators like the EIC and HL-LHC will come online, heralding a new era for precision collider physics. 30% of inelastic LHC events and a predicted 20% of the EIC cross-section will be diffractive, exhibiting large gaps devoid of particles. Diffractive processes promise to unlock diverse new frontiers of theoretical physics, ranging from the forward regime at colliders, to the saturation of ions with gluons, to the behavior of cosmic ray showers, and can provide a unique environment for new physics searches. A thorough understanding of diffraction is also crucial for experimental objectives such as tracking luminosity at colliders, understanding pile-up, and building accurate Monte Carlo generators. Nonetheless, significant gaps remain in our understanding of gapped physics. In this talk, we use the technique of effective field theory (EFT) to derive the first factorization formula for the forward (Regge) physics in electron-proton diffraction, connecting experimental cross-sections to the fundamental underlying hadronic dynamics at play. This factorization goes beyond conventional formulas for diffraction used in global fits, and provides new testable predictions and observables for diffraction. This general framework provides a universal field-theoretic approach to describe a much wider variety of diffractive processes, including at the LHC.