We analyse the associated production of Higgs and $Z$ boson via heavy-quark loops at the LHC in the Standard Model and beyond. We first review the main features of the Born $2to 2$ production, and in particular discuss the high-energy behaviour, angu
lar distributions and $Z$ boson polarisation. We then consider the effects of extra QCD radiation as described by the $2 to 3$ loop matrix elements, and find that they dominate at high Higgs transverse momentum. We show how merged samples of 0-- and 1--jet multiplicities, matched to a parton shower can provide a reliable description of differential distributions in $ZH$ production. In addition to the Standard Model study, results in a generic two-Higgs-doublet-model are obtained and presented for a set of representative and experimentally viable benchmarks for $Zh^0$, $ZH^0$ and $ZA^0$ production. We observe that various interesting features appear either due to the resonant enhancement of the cross-section or to interference patterns between resonant and non-resonant contributions.
Matrix element reweighting is a powerful experimental technique widely employed to maximize the amount of information that can be extracted from a collider data set. We present a procedure that allows to automatically evaluate the weights for any pro
cess of interest in the standard model and beyond. Given the initial, intermediate and final state particles, and the transfer functions for the final physics objects, such as leptons, jets, missing transverse energy, our algorithm creates a phase-space mapping designed to efficiently perform the integration of the squared matrix element and the transfer functions. The implementation builds up on MadGraph, it is completely automatized and publicly available. A few sample applications are presented that show the capabilities of the code and illustrate the possibilities for new studies that such an approach opens up.
This is the summary and introduction to the proceedings contributions for the Les Houches 2009 Tools and Monte Carlo working group.
We consider the J/psi photo-production data collected at HERA in the light of next-to-leading order predictions for the color-singlet yield and polarization. We find that, while the shapes of inclusive distributions in the transverse momentum and ine
lasticity are well reproduced, the experimental rates are larger than those given by the color-singlet contribution alone. Furthermore, the next-to-leading order calculation predicts the J/psis to be mostly longitudinally polarized at high transverse momentum in contrast with the trend of the preliminary data from the ZEUS collaboration.
We present a simple method to automatically evaluate arbitrary tree-level amplitudes involving the production or decay of a heavy quark pair QQbar in a generic {2S+1}L_J^[1,8] state, i.e., the short distance coefficients appearing in the NRQCD factor
ization formalism. Our approach is based on extracting the relevant contributions from the open heavy quark-antiquark amplitudes through an expansion with respect to the quark-antiquark relative momentum and the application of suitable color and spin projectors. To illustrate the capabilities of the method and its implementation in MadGraph a few applications to quarkonium collider phenomenology are presented.
