James Inglis - Searching for New Physics with the Standard Model Effective Field Theory

Wednesday 11 Nov 2026, 13:30 → 15:00 Europe/London

610 (G.O. Jones Bulding)

https://cern.zoom.us/j/67501511814?pwd=4RlJLpbhXENmVQVLaPAbMuweQ5xIwM.1

About the speaker: 

James is a final-year postgraduate student at Queen Mary University of London, supervised by Eram Rizvi. He submitted his thesis in late September and is due to complete his viva on 25th November.

James is a member of the ATLAS Collaboration and has undertaken two separate research projects within ATLAS. The first focused on optimising the ATLAS trigger system, which is designed to filter out proton-proton collisions at the LHC and select the most interesting events for further analysis. The second project involved the statistical fitting of the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT), which is the subject of this seminar. In addition to his work within ATLAS, James has undertaken a theoretical physics research project investigating black hole microstructure, working with Rodolfo Russo from the School of Mathematical Sciences.

Prior to joining Queen Mary, James completed an integrated master's degree in Mathematics and Chemistry at Durham University. Although initially studied as largely separate disciplines, mathematics and chemistry became increasingly interconnected as his undergraduate studies progressed, ultimately leading him towards quantum physics. This sparked his interest in pursuing further study in particle physics.

1 Biscuits and Coffee

Searching for New Physics with the Standard Model Effective Field Theory

The Standard Model has been very reliable and successful, explaining the vast majority of observed physical phenomena. However, despite its successes, the Standard Model is not without its shortcomings and is known to be incomplete. Whilst there are many plausible theories extending the Standard Model and resolving its problems, it is not clear which theory is the true description of Nature. It is of interest to search for the effects of new physics in a model-independent yet quantifiable manner, and the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) offers an attractive way of achieving this.
This talk will provide an introduction to the SMEFT, motivating its construction and demonstrating its strengths as a tool for probing new physics. It will explore how experimental collider data can be used to constrain the SMEFT, with a particular focus on a case study involving the SMEFT interpretation of an ATLAS measurement of the charged-current Drell–Yan process (arXiv:2502.21088). Finally, the combination of multiple collider measurements in a so-called global SMEFT fit will be discussed, and results from the world's largest SMEFT fit (arXiv:2604.21670) will be presented.

Convener: James Matthew Inglis (Queen Mary)