LHC Phenomenology with KrkNLO Matching

Charm and beauty photoproduction has been studied in ep collisions at HERA with the ZEUS and H1 detectors. Heavy quarks were identified using differe nt experimental techniques. Charm was identified via the reconstruction of D* mesons, while bea uty was tagged via its semi-leptonic decay into leptons or using lifetime tagging techniques. Differential cross sections were measured and compared to leading order plus parton shower (LO+PS) Monte Carlo and next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD predictions.

Extending previous work on the predictions for the production of supersymmetric (SUSY) particles at the LHC, we present the fully differential calculation of the next-to-leading order (NLO) SUSY-QCD corrections to the production of squark and squark–antisquark pairs of the first two generations. The NLO cross sections are combined with the subsequent decay of the final state (anti)squarks into the lightest neutralino and (anti)quark at NLO SUSY-QCD. No assumptions on the squark masses are made, and the various subchannels are taken into account independently. In order to obtain realistic predictions for differential distributions the fixed-order calculations have to be combined with parton showers. Making use of the Powheg method we have implemented our results in the Powheg-Box framework and interfaced the NLO calculation with the parton shower Monte Carlo programs Pythia6 and Herwig++. The code is publicly available and can be downloaded from the Powheg-Box webpage. The impact of the NLO corrections on the differential distributions is studied and parton shower effects are investigated for different benchmark scenarios.

We apply the MC@NLO approach to the process of heavy flavour hadroproduction. MC@NLO is a method for matching next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD calculations and parton shower Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, with the following features: fully exclusive events are generated, with hadronisation according to the MC model; total rates are accurate to NLO; NLO results for distributions are recovered upon expansion in $\as$; hard emissions are treated as in NLO computations while soft/collinear emissions are handled by the MC simulation, with the same logarithmic accuracy as the MC; matching between the hard and soft regions is smooth, and no intermediate integration steps are necessary. The method was applied previously to the hadroproduction of gauge boson pairs, which at NLO involves only initial-state QCD radiation and a unique colour structure. In heavy flavour production, it is necessary to include contributions from final-state QCD radiation and different colour flows. We present illustrative results on top and bottom production at the Tevatron and LHC.

Parton-shower matching for electroweak corrections

We report on a method for matching the next-to-leading order calculation of QCD jet production in ${e}^{+}{e}^{\ensuremath{-}}$ annihilation with a Monte Carlo parton shower event generator (MC) to produce realistic final states. The final result is accurate to next-to-leading order (NLO) for infrared-safe one-scale quantities, such as the Durham 3-jet fraction ${y}_{3}$, and agrees well with parton shower results for multiscale quantities, such as the jet mass distribution in 3-jet events. For our numerical results, the NLO calculation is matched to the event generator Pythia, though the method is more general. We compare one-scale and multiscale quantities from pure NLO, pure MC, and matched NLO-MC calculations.

After the discovery of a Higgs boson in 2012 at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) the detailed study of its properties, and most importantly its couplings to other particles, has started. This is a very important task to be completed, in particular to test whether it is indeed the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model (SM). The precise study of the Higgs couplings to gauge bosons is of particular importance and requires as much information as possible. In this view this paper provides the next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to the production cross sections and differential distributions of a SM Higgs boson in association with a pair of weak bosons $W^+W^-$, $W^\pm Z$ and $ZZ$, matched with parton shower (PS) in the POWHEG-BOX framework. The NLO QCD corrections are found to be significant and PS effects are sizable at low $p_T$ in the jet differential distributions, as expected, while these effects are negligible in other distributions. We will also provide a detailed study of the theoretical uncertainties affecting the total production rates at the LHC and at the Future Circular Collider in hadron-hadron mode, the potential 100 TeV follow-up of the LHC machine: the scale uncertainty calculated by the variation of the renormalization and factorization scales, the parton distribution function and related $\alpha_s$ errors as well as the parametric uncertainties on the input weak boson masses.

We present a method for obtaining an initial-state parton shower model where the (backward) evolution fully consistent with the (forward) evolution of the collinear parton density used. As a proof-of-concept we use parton densities obtained with the parton branching (PB) approach, and modify the default initial-state shower in Pythia8 with this method to be consistent with them. PB is ideally suited for checking the validity of our method since, in addition to producing collinear parton densities, it also produces the corresponding transverse-dependent (TMD) ones, and these can then be directly compared to the transverse momentum distribution obtained from the parton shower. We show that TMD distributions which we in this way obtain from our modified Pythia8 shower using leading order (LO) parton densities and splitting functions are fully consistent with the corresponding leading order TMD densities. At next-to-leading order (NLO) it is not possible to achieve the same consistency using the built-in LO splitting functions in the shower, but we show that by introducing NLO splitting functions using a reweighting procedure, we can achieve consistency also at NLO. The method presented here, which we have named Pdf2Isr, can be easily extended to any collinear parton densities, as long as the exact conditions for the evolution are known. With the Pdf2Isr method we obtain an initial-state parton shower which in principle has no free parameters, and is fully consistent with collinear parton densities at LO and NLO.

We calculate the complete next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to the [Formula: see text]-odd mirror quark pair [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text] production in the littlest Higgs model with [Formula: see text]-parity (LHT) at a high energy [Formula: see text] collider. We present the dependence of the leading order (LO) and NLO QCD corrected cross sections on the colliding energy [Formula: see text]. Our calculation includes the subsequent full weak decays of the final [Formula: see text]-odd mirror quarks by adopting the narrow width approximation and the exclusive 2-jet event selection criterion. We provide the LO and QCD NLO kinematic distributions of final particles. We find that the NLO QCD correction is phase space dependent and modifies the LO cross section evidently. The [Formula: see text]-factor increases noticeably when [Formula: see text] approaches the threshold of the on-shell [Formula: see text]-pair production. We conclude that it is possible to separate the signature of the [Formula: see text]-odd quark pair production from possible Standard Model (SM) background by taking proper kinematic cut.

New measurements are presented of diractiv e dijet and open charm cross sections in deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) and photo-production at HERA. The results are compared with next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD predictions based on parton density functions obtained from diractiv e inclusive DIS data. A combined NLO QCD t to the inclusive and dijet DIS data is performed to determine diractiv e quark singlet and gluon densities. The diractiv e open charm cross sections in DIS and photo-production are consistent with the NLO predictions. In case of dijet photo-production, the measured cross sections are about half of the NLO predictions indicating breaking of QCD factorization.

Dijet and multijet photoproduction at HERA/ZEUS

Next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD predictions for the production of heavy quarks in proton-proton collisions are presented within three different approaches to quark mass, resummation and fragmentation effects. In particular, new NLO and parton shower simulations with POWHEG are performed in the ALICE kinematic regime at three different centre-of-mass energies, including scale and parton density variations, in order to establish a reliable baseline for future detailed studies of heavy-quark suppression in heavy-ion collisions. Very good agreement of POWHEG is found with FONLL, in particular for centrally produced D^0, D^+ and D^*+ mesons and electrons from charm and bottom quark decays, but also with the generally somewhat higher GM-VFNS predictions within the theoretical uncertainties. The latter are dominated by scale rather than quark mass variations. Parton density uncertainties for charm and bottom quark production are computed here with POWHEG for the first time and shown to be dominant in the forward regime, e.g. for muons coming from heavy-flavour decays. The fragmentation into D_s^+ mesons seems to require further tuning within the NLO Monte Carlo approach.

We detail a calculation of W gamma production in hadronic collision, at Next-to-Leading Order (NLO) QCD interfaced to a shower generator according to the POWHEG prescription supplemented with the MiNLO procedure. The fixed order result is matched to an interleaved QCD+QED parton shower, in such a way that the contribution arising from hadron fragmentation into photons is fully modeled. In general, our calculation illustrates a new approach to the fully exclusive simulation of prompt photon production processes accurate at the NLO level in QCD. We compare our predictions to those of the NLO program MCFM, which treats the fragmentation contribution in terms of photon fragmentation functions. We also perform comparisons to available LHC data at 7 TeV, for which we observe good agreement, and provide phenomenological results for physics studies of the W gamma production process at the Run II of the LHC. The new tool, which includes W leptonic decays and the contribution of anomalous gauge couplings, allows a fully exclusive, hadron-level description of the W gamma process, and is publicly available at the repository of the POWHEG BOX. Our approach can be easily adapted to deal with other relevant isolated photon production processes in hadronic collisions.

Soft-drop grooming of hadron-collision final states has the potential to significantly reduce the impact of non-perturbative corrections, and in particular the underlying-event contribution. This eventually will enable a more direct comparison of accurate perturbative predictions with experimental measurements. In this study we consider soft-drop groomed dijet event shapes. We derive general results needed to perform the resummation of suitable event-shape variables to next-to-leading logarithmic (NLL) accuracy matched to exact next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD matrix elements. We compile predictions for the transverse-thrust shape accurate to NLO + NLL′ using the implementation of the Caesar formalism in the Sherpa event generator framework. We complement this by state-of-the-art parton- and hadron-level predictions based on NLO QCD matrix elements matched with parton showers. We explore the potential to mitigate non-perturbative corrections for particle-level and track-based measurements of transverse thrust by considering a wide range of soft-drop parameters. We find that soft-drop grooming indeed is very efficient in removing the underlying event. This motivates future experimental measurements to be compared to precise QCD predictions and employed to constrain non-perturbative models in Monte-Carlo simulations.

The associated production of charged Higgs bosons and top quarks at hadron colliders is an important discovery channel to establish the existence of a non-minimal Higgs sector. Here, we present details of a next-to-leading order (NLO) calculation of this process using the Catani–Seymour dipole formalism and describe its implementation in POWHEG, which allows to match NLO calculations to parton showers. Numerical predictions are presented using the PYTHIA parton shower and are compared to those obtained previously at fixed order, to a leading order calculation matched to the PYTHIA parton shower, and to a different NLO calculation matched to the HERWIG parton shower with MC@NLO. We also present numerical predictions and theoretical uncertainties for various Two Higgs Doublet Models at the Tevatron and LHC.

We present a next-to-leading order (NLO) calculation of $t\bar{t}$ production in hadronic collisions interfaced to shower generators according to the POWHEG method. We start from an NLO result from previous work, obtained in the zero width limit, where radiative corrections to both production and decays are included. The POWHEG interface required an extension of the POWHEG BOX framework, in order to deal with radiation from the decay of resonances. This extension is fully general (i.e. it can be applied in principle to any process considered in the zero width limit), and is here applied for the first time. In order to perform a realistic simulation, we introduce finite width effects using different approximations, that we validated by comparing with published exact NLO results. We have interfaced our POWHEG code to the PYTHIA8 shower Monte Carlo generator. At this stage, we dealt with novel issues related to the treatment of resonances, especially with regard to the initial scale for the shower that needs to be set appropriately. This procedure affects, for example, the fragmentation function of the b quark, that we have studied with particular attention. We believe that the tool presented here improves over previous generators for all aspects that have to do with top decays, and especially for the study of issues related to top mass measurements that involve B hadrons or b jets. The work presented here also constitutes a first step towards a fully consistent matching of NLO calculations involving intermediate resonances decaying into coloured particles, with parton showers.