Parton Distributions in the Era of Precision Physics and Beyond

par Tanjona Rabemananjara

jeudi 21 mai 2026, 10:30 → 12:30 Europe/Paris

100/2-A201 - Salle A201 (IJCLab)

Recent decades have seen a remarkable increase in the precision of measurements at hadron colliders, culminating in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) operating as a precision laboratory for the Standard Model (SM) and for indirect searches for physics beyond it. Parton Distribution Functions (PDFs), which encode the quark and gluon structure of the proton, have become a central ingredient in theoretical predictions for collider observables. Achieving the full scientific potential of the precision frontier therefore requires PDF determinations with unprecedented accuracy, robustness, and reliability.

In this talk, I will review the current state-of-the-art in PDF extractions from global analyses of collider and fixed-target data, highlighting recent methodological advances in perturbative calculations up to N3LO, statistical inference, and machine-learning-based parametrizations. I will discuss how modern PDF determinations are validated through increasingly sophisticated techniques, including closure and future tests studies, which provide quantitative assessments of methodological biases, uncertainty estimates, and extrapolation capabilities in realistic High-Luminosity LHC scenarios.

I will also examine the interplay between proton structure and searches for new physics. In particular, I will discuss how PDF uncertainties impact precision measurements and effective-field-theory interpretations in the high-energy tails of collider distributions, as well as the potential risk of partially absorbing beyond-the-Standard-Model signals into the PDF determination itself. Finally, I will outline future directions towards statistically consistent frameworks, paving the way for robust precision phenomenology at the HL-LHC and future collider facilities.