Tilman Plehn

Greetings from Heidelberg, the most beautiful theoretical physics institute in Germany. Come and visit us at the villas to judge for yourself.

If I am not playing my trombone I am interested in Higgs physics and new physics at the LHC and I am still completely convinced we will find something exciting once the LHC runs closer to design energy and luminosity. Obviously, the Nobel prize for the Higgs discovery is making this field of research a little hectic, but once the dust settles there will be lots of interesting studies between theory and experiment on. Right now I am working on the new edition of my Higgs and QCD lecture notes, so you can download a reasonably updated version from this website. You can find all of my publications including number of citations and all that here, and please feel free to browse through my linked talks.

For quite a while I have been calculating higher order cross sections in supersymmetry, working on a Fortran package called Prospino2. It also includes some private results on charged Higgs bosons. Or one of the coolest tools in high energy physics: MadEvent - now including all kinds of new physics models and being extended to next-to-leading order as MadGolem.
Searches for Higgs bosons and for new particles have brought us to think about the reconstruction of top quarks. It turns out that if they are boosted enough to be caught in one jet they can be identified and reconstructed very similar to a bottom tag. Our Heidelberg ATLAS groups has also proven that our HEPTopTagger works on actual LHC data, which is great news.
Given that the LHC experiments are a little behind schedule when it comes to discovering new particles we have had a look at jet (means quark and gluon) production. While the general attitude often is that this is all boring and well understood, there remains a serious puzzle: why does the number of jets not at all behave like a Poisson distribution as many text books tell us? Any ideas?
And last, but not least our attempt to combine measurements from the LHC, for example in the Higgs sector: SFitter - run by a French-German coalition of the difficult which hast just published a series of Higgs couplings analysis. Supersymmetry studies we also still publish, but we would rather write these papers about positive experimental results.

In general, if you are interested in any of these things: call me, come by, catch me if you can. We do have bachelor, master, and PhD thesis projects in all research directions of our group. Our group has a lot of fun thinking about LHC theory, so please come and join us for a coffee or a thesis. The only thing we require is a nice set of lectures heard, indicating that your studies are driven more by the excitement for physics than a career perspective as a management consultant. This definitely includes having heard Quantum Field Theory I and II, Standard Model physics, and some of the advanced lectures and seminars we offer in particle phenomenology. If you started off as an experimentalist and you would like to switch to theory we will try hard to make this possible. In general, Heidelberg offers a huge number of advanced lectures, so please make use of them to then get a rapid start into a research project.

Finally, if you are interested how I ended up here, have a look at my short CV. Even though in our group we have seen some really nice careers unfold, please do yourself the favor and have a good plan B before trying your luck the same way...