High Energy Physics Seminars

With the LHC recently having achieved collisions at a world-record center of mass energy of 7 TeV, particle physics is moving into a new era. The collision environment at the LHC is determined by the accelerator but also by the structure of the proton. The LHC will probe smaller momentum fractions with higher momentum transfers than any previous collider. I will discuss some of the planned techniques to study and constrain the proton structure using electroweak bosons as probes in LHC collisions. These measurements are a key component to our understanding of the backgrounds to possible new physics signatures and also have relevance for constraining the explanations for any new observation.