Quarks and gluons are ubiquitous in the debris of the proton-proton collisions of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), but they can also signal the presence of massive particles that are signs of new physics: they are the needle in the proverbial haystack…of needles. However, for the first time in the history of particle physics, the collision energy at the LHC is often well above the scale of electroweak symmetry breaking. Not only did this allow for the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, but it also leads to exotic new features of the quarks and gluons that appear in the final states of those collisions. I will describe why the LHC is a fantastic “quark and gluon” machine, how new techniques to image the events observed at the LHC allow us probe jets — the observable manifestation of quarks and gluons — in exquisite detail, and present the status of the jet substructure and Lorentz-boosted object tagging approaches in the ATLAS Experiment. These techniques are already being deployed successfully in searches for new particles and precision measurements of the Standard Model. I will then look toward the future and describe new instrumentation that we’re developing to identify and record Lorentz-boosted hadronic objects in future runs of the LHC. If time permits, I will also describe a new indepoendent experiment at the LHC to detect the presence of new physics with fractionally charged particles, called the MilliQan Experiment.
