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Abstract: The Recent Revolution in NLO QCD Predictions for the LHC

The Large Hadron Collider is now exploring the energy frontier of particle physics, searching for new particles and interactions. For the LHC to uncover many types of new physics, the "old physics" produced by the Standard Model must be understood very well. For decades, the central theoretical tool for this job was the Feynman diagram. However, Feynman diagrams are just too slow, even on fast computers, to allow adequate precision at next-to-leading order in the strong coupling of QCD, for complicated events with many jets in the final state. Such events are already being produced copiously at the LHC. Over the past few years, alternative methods to Feynman diagrams have come to fruition. These new "on-shell" methods are based on the old principle of unitarity. They can be much more efficient because they exploit the underlying simplicity of scattering amplitudes, and recycle lower-loop information. I will explain how and why these methods work, and present recent state-of-the-art results obtained with them.