No Arabic abstract
We consider the probability for a colour-singlet qqbar pair to emit a gluon, in strongly and smoothly ordered antenna showers. We expand to second order in alphaS and compare to the second-order QCD matrix elements for Z -> 3 jets, neglecting terms suppressed by 1/NC^2. We give a prescription that corrects the shower to the matrix-element result at this order for both soft and hard emissions, thereby explicitly reducing its dependence on evolution- and renormalization-scale choices. We confirm that the choice of pT for both of these scales absorbs all logarithms through order alphaS^2, and contrast this with various alternatives. We include these corrections in the VINCIA shower generator and study the impact on LEP event-shape and fragmentation observables. An uncertainty estimate is provided for each event, in the form of a vector of alternative weights.
We compare different procedures for combining fixed-order tree-level matrix element generators with parton showers. We use the case of W-production at the Tevatron and the LHC to compare different implementations of the so-called CKKW scheme and one based on the so-called MLM scheme using different matrix element generators and different parton cascades. We find that although similar results are obtained in all cases, there are important differences.
In this talk, we discuss recent developments in combining parton showers and fixed-order calculations. We focus on the UNNLOPS method for matching next-to-next-to-leading order computations to the parton shower, and we present results from Sherpa for Drell-Yan lepton-pair and Higgs-boson production at the LHC.
We report on our exploration of matching matrix element calculations with the parton-shower models contained in the event generators HERWIG and Pythia. We describe results for e+e- collisions and for the hadroproduction of W bosons and Drell--Yan pairs. We compare methods based on (1) a strict implementation of ideas proposed by Catani, et al., (2) a generalization based on using the internal Sudakov form factors of HERWIG and Pythia, and (3) a simpler proposal of M. Mangano. Where appropriate, we show the dependence on various choices of scales and clustering that do not affect the soft and collinear limits of the predictions, but have phenomenological implications. Finally, we comment on how to use these results to state systematic errors on the theoretical predictions.
In the low-energy effective action of string theories, non-abelian gauge interactions and supergravity are augmented by infinite towers of higher-mass-dimension operators. We propose a new method to construct one-loop matrix elements with insertions of operators $D^{2k} F^n$ and $D^{2k} R^n$ in the tree-level effective action of type-I and type-II superstrings. Inspired by ambitwistor string theories, our method is based on forward limits of moduli-space integrals using string tree-level amplitudes with two extra points, expanded in powers of the inverse string tension $alpha$. Similar to one-loop ambitwistor computations, intermediate steps feature non-standard linearized Feynman propagators which eventually recombine to conventional quadratic propagators. With linearized propagators the loop integrand of the matrix elements obey one-lo
We present an antenna shower formalism including contributions from initial-state partons and corresponding backwards evolution. We give a set of phase-space maps and antenna functions for massless partons which define a complete shower formalism suitable for computing observables with hadronic initial states. We focus on the initial-state components: initial-initial and initial-final antenna configurations. The formalism includes comprehensive possibilities for uncertainty estimates. We report on some preliminary results obtained with an implementation in the Vincia antenna-shower framework.