NLO merging in tt+jets

In this talk the application of the recently introduced methods to merge NLO calculations of successive jet multiplicities to the production of top pairs in association with jets will be discussed, in particular a fresh look is taken at the top quark forward-backward asymmetries. Emphasis will be put on the achieved theoretical accuracy and the associated perturbative and non-perturbative error estimates.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, proceedings contribution for EPS 2013, Stockholm, 17-24 Jul

Next-to-leading order diphoton+2-jet production at the LHC

We present results from a recent calculation of prompt photon-pair production in association with two jets to next-to-leading order (NLO) at the LHC. The virtual contribution is evaluated using the BlackHat library, a numerical implementation of on-shell methods for one-loop amplitudes, in conjunction with SHERPA. We study four sets of cuts: standard jet cuts, a set of Higgs-related cuts suggested by ATLAS, and corresponding sets which isolate the kinematic region where the process becomes the largest background to Higgs production via vector-boson fusion.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, Presented at 11th International Symposium on Radiative Corrections (RADCOR 2013), 22-27 September 2013, Lumley Castle Hotel, Durham, U

The one-loop six-dimensional hexagon integral with three massive corners

We compute the six-dimensional hexagon integral with three non-adjacent external masses analytically. After a simple rescaling, it is given by a function of six dual conformally invariant cross-ratios. The result can be expressed as a sum of 24 terms involving only one basic function, which is a simple linear combination of logarithms, dilogarithms, and trilogarithms of uniform degree three transcendentality. Our method uses differential equations to determine the symbol of the function, and an algorithm to reconstruct the latter from its symbol. It is known that six-dimensional hexagon integrals are closely related to scattering amplitudes in N=4 super Yang-Mills theory, and we therefore expect our result to be helpful for understanding the structure of scattering amplitudes in this theory, in particular at two loops.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure

Report of the 2005 Snowmass Top/QCD Working Group

This report discusses several topics in both top quark physics and QCD at an International Linear Collider (ILC). Issues such as measurements at the $t\bar{t}$ threshold, including both theoretical and machine requirements, and the determination of electroweak top quark couplings, are reviewed. New results concerning the potential of a 500 GeV $e^+e^-$ collider for measuring $Wtb$ couplings and the top quark Yukawa coupling are presented. The status of higher order QCD corrections to jet production cross sections, heavy quark form factors, and longitudinal gauge boson scattering, needed for percent-level studies at the ILC, are reviewed. A new study of the measurement of the hadronic structure of the photon at a $\gamma\gamma$ collider is presented. The effects on top quark properties from several models of new physics, including composite models, Little Higgs theories, and CPT violation, are studied.Comment: 39 pages, many figs; typos fixed and refs added. Contributed to the 2005 International Linear Collider Physics and Detector Workshop and 2nd ILC Accelerator Workshop, Snowmass, Colorado, 14-27 Aug 200

Comparative Study of Various Algorithms for the Merging of Parton Showers and Matrix Elements in Hadronic Collisions

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 and MLM schemes using different matrix-element generators and different parton cascades. We find that although similar results are obtained in all cases, there are important differences

A Standard format for Les Houches event files

A standard file format is proposed to store process and event information, primarily output from parton-level event generators for further use by general-purpose ones. The information content is identical with what was already defined by the Les Houches Accord five years ago, but then in terms of Fortran commonblocks. This information is embedded in a minimal XML-style structure, for clarity and to simplify parsing

Novel QCD Phenomena at Electron-Proton Colliders

I discuss several novel phenomenological features of QCD which are observable in deep inelastic lepton-nucleon and lepton-nucleus scattering. Initial- and final-state interactions from gluon exchange, normally neglected in the parton model, have a profound effect on QCD hard-scattering reactions, leading to leading-twist single-spin asymmetries, the diffractive contribution to deep inelastic scattering, and the breakdown of the pQCD Lam-Tung relation in Drell-Yan reactions. Leading-twist diffractive processes in turn lead to nuclear shadowing and non-universal antishadowing--physics not incorporated in the light-front wavefunctions of the nucleus computed in isolation