Herwig 7 is a general-purpose Monte Carlo generator of particle collisions comprising both hard perturbative as well as soft phenomenological physics. Herwig is therefore capable to describe the entire final state of hadronized particles in a collision event. A spacetime topology of a parton system entering hadronization is fully described and tested for the first time. A combination of information from particles momenta and spacetime positions is utilized to minimize a boost-invariant distance measure of the parton system. We present a reasonable agreement of the model with a selection of experimental data and conclude that spacetime event topology can be meaningfully used in the further development.
We discuss the necessary steps for implementing an angularly ordered (AO) electroweak (EW) parton shower in Herwig 7 multi-purpose event generator. This includes calculating the helicity-dependent quasi-collinear EW branching functions that correspond to the full range of final-state EW parton shower, in addition to the initial-state EW gauge vector boson radiations. The results are successfully embedded in the AO Herwig 7 shower algorithm and have undergone a set of comprehensive and conclusive performance tests. Furthermore, we have used this EW parton shower algorithm, alongside the existing $QCD+QED$ AO shower, to predict the angular distributions of $W^{pm}$ bosons in LHC events with high transverse momentum jets. These results are compared against the explicitly generated underlying events as well as the existing ATLAS data to show the effectiveness of the newly implemented $QCD+QED+EW$ AO parton shower scheme.
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.
We present studies that show how multi-parton interaction and color reconnection affect the hadro-chemistry in proton-proton (pp) collisions with special focus on the production of resonances using the PYTHIA8 event generator. We find that color reconnection suppresses the relative production of meson resonances such as $rho_{0}$ and K*, providing an alternative explanation for the K*/K decrease observed in proton-proton collisions as a function of multiplicity by the ALICE collaboration. Detailed studies of the underlying mechanism causing meson resonance suppression indicate that color reconnection leads to shorter, less energetic strings whose fragmentation is less likely to produce more massive hadrons for a given quark content, therefore reducing ratios such as K*/K and $rho_0/pi$ in high-multiplicity pp collisions. In addition, we have also studied the effects of allowing string junctions to form and found that these may also contribute to resonance suppression.
Parton shower Monte Carlo event generators in which the shower evolves from hard splittings to soft splittings generally use the leading color approximation, which is the leading term in an expansion in powers of $1/N_c^2$, where $N_c = 3$ is the number of colors. We introduce a more general approximation, the LC+ approximation, that includes some of the color suppressed contributions. There is a cost: each generated event comes with a weight. There is a benefit: at each splitting the leading soft$times$collinear singularity and the leading collinear singularity are treated exactly with respect to color. In addition, an LC+ shower can start from a state of the color density matrix in which the bra state color and the ket state color do not match.
Parton shower event generators typically approximate evolution of QCD color so that only contributions that are leading in the limit of an infinite number of colors are retained. Our parton shower generator, Deductor, has used an LC+ approximation that is better, but still quite limited. In this paper, we introduce a new scheme for color in which the approximations can be systematically improved. That is, one can choose the theoretical accuracy level, but the accuracy level that is practical is limited by the computer resources available.