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 (in spite of not practicing enough I still play a reasonably loud bass trombone in the Heidelberg Tonart orchestra) I am interested in Higgs physics and new physics at the LHC and I am still completely convinced we will find something interesting once the LHC runs closer to design energy and luminosity. My publications you can find 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. All we need is the final proof that our HEPTopTagger works on actual LHC data.
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 its first Higgs couplings analysis.

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, please come and join us for a coffee or a thesis. The only thing we require is a nice set of lectures you heard, indicating that your studies are driven more by the excitement for physics than a career perspective as a management consultant. Before you walk up the hill, maybe you'd like to have a look at my travel plans, though.

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...