Precision physics at the future muon collider

by Yang Ma (UC Louvain)

Wednesday 7 May 2025, 14:30 → 15:30 Europe/Berlin

build. 2a, SR2 (DESY Hamburg)

Exploring the energy frontier is one of the most promising paths toward uncovering new physics beyond the Standard Model, and high-energy colliders remain our most powerful tools in this pursuit. Thanks to recent technological advances in muon cooling, the prospect of building a multi-TeV muon collider is becoming increasingly realistic. Such a machine would provide direct access to TeV-scale physics and open new opportunities to study the Higgs boson in detail—a particle widely regarded as a potential portal to new physics.

One of the key challenges at these energies is the impact of electroweak radiation: photons, W/Z bosons, and even neutrinos can be emitted collinearly with the beams, creating complex initial states. These effects can be systematically described using an electroweak parton distribution function (EW PDF) framework, similar to how QCD PDFs are used at the LHC. Moreover, just as next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections are crucial at hadron colliders, NLO electroweak corrections may play a significant role at a muon collider.

In this talk, I will give a broad overview of the physics opportunities and theoretical challenges at a future muon collider, with an emphasis on how precision theory tools are shaping our path to the next frontier in particle physics.