GR@PPA 2.8: initial-state jet matching for weak boson production processes at hadron collisions

The initial-state jet matching method introduced in our previous studies has been applied to the event generation of single $W$ and $Z$ production processes and diboson ($W^{+}W^{-}$, $WZ$ and $ZZ$) production processes at hadron collisions in the framework of the GR@PPA event generator. The generated events reproduce the transverse momentum spectra of weak bosons continuously in the entire kinematical region. The matrix elements (ME) for hard interactions are still at the tree level. As in previous versions, the decays of weak bosons are included in the matrix elements. Therefore, spin correlations and phase-space effects in the decay of weak bosons are exact at the tree level. The program package includes custom-made parton shower programs as well as ME-based hard interaction generators in order to achieve self-consistent jet matching. The generated events can be passed to general-purpose event generators to make the simulation proceed down to the hadron level.Comment: 29 pages, 14 figures; minor changes to clarify the discussions, and corrections of typo

Computational Particle Physics for Event Generators and Data Analysis

High-energy physics data analysis relies heavily on the comparison between experimental and simulated data as stressed lately by the Higgs search at LHC and the recent identification of a Higgs-like new boson. The first link in the full simulation chain is the event generation both for background and for expected signals. Nowadays event generators are based on the automatic computation of matrix element or amplitude for each process of interest. Moreover, recent analysis techniques based on the matrix element likelihood method assign probabilities for every event to belong to any of a given set of possible processes. This method originally used for the top mass measurement, although computing intensive, has shown its power at LHC to extract the new boson signal from the background. Serving both needs, the automatic calculation of matrix element is therefore more than ever of prime importance for particle physics. Initiated in the eighties, the techniques have matured for the lowest order calculations (tree-level), but become complex and CPU time consuming when higher order calculations involving loop diagrams are necessary like for QCD processes at LHC. New calculation techniques for next-to-leading order (NLO) have surfaced making possible the generation of processes with many final state particles (up to 6). If NLO calculations are in many cases under control, although not yet fully automatic, even higher precision calculations involving processes at 2-loops or more remain a big challenge. After a short introduction to particle physics and to the related theoretical framework, we will review some of the computing techniques that have been developed to make these calculations automatic. The main available packages and some of the most important applications for simulation and data analysis, in particular at LHC will also be summarized.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures, Proceedings of CCP (Conference on Computational Physics) Oct. 2012, Osaka (Japan) in IOP Journal of Physics: Conference Serie

Consistent simulation of non-resonant diphoton production at hadron collisions with a custom-made parton shower

We have developed a Monte Carlo event generator for non-resonant diphoton ($\gamma\gamma$) production at hadron collisions in the framework of GR@PPA, which consistently includes additional one-jet production. The jet-matching method developed for initial-state jet production has been extended to the final state in order to regularize the final-state QED divergence in the $qg \rightarrow \gamma\gamma + q$ process. A QCD/QED-mixed parton shower (PS) has been developed to complete the matching. The PS has the capability of enforcing hard-photon radiation, and small-$Q^{2}$ photon radiations that are not covered by the PS are supplemented by using a fragmentation function. The generated events can be passed to general-purpose event generators in order to perform the simulations down to the hadron level. Thus, we can simulate the isolation requirements that must be applied in experiments at the hadron level. The simulation results are in reasonable agreement with the predictions from RESBOS and DIPHOX. The simulated hadron-level events can be further fed to detector simulations in order to investigate the detailed performance of experiments.Comment: 23 pages, 15 figure