Electroweak Radiative Corrections for Collider Physics

Abstract

Current particle phenomenology is characterized by the spectacular agreement of the predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics (SM) with all results from collider experiments and by the absence of significant signals of non-standard physics, despite the fact that we know that the SM cannot be the ultimate theory of nature. In this situation, confronting theory and experiment with high precision is a promising direction to look for potential traces of physics beyond the SM. On the theory side, the calculation of radiative corrections of the strong and electroweak interactions is at the heart of this task, a field that has seen tremendous conceptual and technical progress in the last decades. This review aims at a coherent introduction to the field of electroweak corrections and tries to fill gaps in the literature between standard textbook knowledge and the current state of the art. The SM and the machinery for its perturbative evaluation are reviewed in detail, putting particular emphasis on renormalization, on one-loop techniques, on modern amplitude methods and tools, on the separation of infrared singularities in real-emission corrections, on electroweak issues connected with hadronic initial or final states in collisions, and on the issue of unstable particles in quantum field theory together with corresponding practical solutions.