The Standard Model from LHC to future colliders

This review summarizes the results of the activities which have taken place in 2014 within the Standard Model Working Group of the "What Next" Workshop organized by INFN, Italy. We present a framework, general questions, and some indications of possible answers on the main issue for Standard Model physics in the LHC era and in view of possible future accelerators.

Next-to-leading-order predictions for t-channel single-top production at hadron colliders

We present the predictions at next-to-leading order (NLO) in the strong coupling for the single-top cross section in the t channel at the Tevatron and the LHC. Our calculation starts from the 2-->3 Born amplitude gq-->tb[over ]q;{'}, keeping the b-quark mass nonzero. A comparison is performed with a traditional NLO calculation of this channel based on the 2-->2 Born process with a bottom quark in the initial state. In particular, the effect of using kinematic approximations and resumming logarithms of the form log(Q2/m(b)2) in the 2-->2 process is assessed. Our results show that the 2-->3 calculation is very well behaved and in substantial agreement with the predictions based on the 2-->2 process.

J/psi production at HERA

We consider the J/psi photoproduction data collected at the DESY ep collider HERA in the light of next-to-leading order predictions for the color-singlet yield and polarization. We find that, while the shapes of inclusive distributions in the transverse momentum and inelasticity are well reproduced, the experimental rates are larger than those given by the color-singlet contribution alone. Furthermore, the next-to-leading order calculation predicts the J/psi's to be mostly longitudinally polarized at high transverse momentum in contrast with the trend of the preliminary data from the ZEUS Collaboration.

Upsilon production at Fermilab Tevatron and LHC energies

We update the theoretical predictions for direct Upsilon(nS) hadroproduction in the framework of nonrelativistic QCD. We show that the next-to-leading order corrections in alpha(S) to the color-singlet transition significantly raise the differential cross section at high p(T) and substantially affect the polarization of the Upsilon. Motivated by the remaining gap between the next-to-leading order yield and the cross-section measurements at the Fermilab Tevatron, we evaluate the leading part of the alpha(S)(5) contributions, namely, those coming from Upsilon(nS) associated with three light partons. The differential color-singlet cross section at alpha(S)(5) is in substantial agreement with the data, so that there is no evidence for the need of color-octet contributions. Furthermore, we find that the polarization of the Upsilon(nS) is longitudinal. We also present our predictions for Upsilon(nS) production at the LHC.

QCD corrections to J/psi and Upsilon production at hadron colliders

We calculate the cross section for hadroproduction of a pair of heavy quarks in a (3)S(1) color-singlet state at next-to-leading order in QCD. This corresponds to the leading contribution in the nonrelativistic QCD expansion for J/psi and Upsilon production. The higher-order corrections have a large impact on the p(T) distributions, enhancing the production at high p(T) at both the Fermilab Tevatron and the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The total decay rate of a (3)S(1) into hadrons at next-to-leading order is also computed, confirming for the first time the result obtained by Mackenzie and Lepage in 1981.

Upper bound on the scale of Majorana-neutrino mass generation

We derive a model-independent upper bound on the scale of Majorana-neutrino mass generation. The upper bound is 4pi (nu2)/square root3 m(nu), where nu approximately 246 GeV is the weak scale and m(nu) is the Majorana-neutrino mass. For neutrino masses implied by neutrino oscillation experiments, all but one of these bounds are less than the Planck scale, and they are all within a few orders of magnitude of the grand-unification scale.