Young particle physicists step up With the challenges of the machine operation driving the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), an Initial Training Network (ITN) has provided optimal training conditions for early-stage researchers in a multidisciplinary environment. Energy © Thinkstock Funded with EUR 4.5 million from the European Commission, the LHCPHENONET (Advanced particle phenomenology in the LHC era) project united young theoretical physicists from around Europe. Many of its team members have already made significant contributions to the theory of strong interactions binding quarks and holding atomic nuclei together. Through the LHCPHENONET project, nearly 41 young researchers from 21 nationalities had the opportunity to pursue their research in 1 of 11 leading research institutions and 3 partners from the industrial environment. They were supported by approximately 160 physicists from 28 European universities and research institutes, as well as the University of Buenos Aires and CERN. The LHCPHENONET network, formed in January 2011 and funded by the European Commission until December 2014, has met many of the new challenges presented by the LHC experiment. The ITN timeline matched the planned LHC running schedule to allow the exploitation and interpretation of early data. A notable start was made in July 2012 with CERN's official announcement that there is evidence of the long-sought Higgs boson particle. Several meetings and workshops were organised to review the state of the art in the phenomenology at the LHC. The events also hosted discussions on future developments of customised open source software for precision physics at colliders, as well as outreach events for the general public and school children. A key component of the LHCPHENONET network's training activity was the doctoral training events, organised by the different ITN teams. Here, participants from around the world discussed higher-order perturbative corrections in the Standard Model and beyond. They explained how the basic building blocks of matter interact, governed by four fundamental forces. This way they contributed, among other achievements, to the definition with the best possible accuracy of the Higgs boson production and decay channels at the LHC. During the first 48 months of LHCPHENONET, network members published 506 scientific papers. They have illustrated that the Standard Model is currently the best description of the subatomic world. Also, several open source codes were developed and made public. New information from experiments at the LHC will continue to help the ongoing search for more of the missing pieces of the physics puzzle hidden deep in the subatomic world. Keywords Physicists, Large Hadron Collider, LHC, CERN, LHCPHENONET, Higgs boson
