Applications of higher order QCD

In this talk we summarize some recent developments in perturbative QCD and their application to particle physics phenomenology.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures. Contribution to the proceedings of the international symposium on Physics in Collision 2013 (PIC 2013

Combining parton showers and NNLO matrix elements

In this talk, we discuss recent developments in combining parton showers and fixed-order calculations. We focus on the UNNLOPS method for matching next-to-next-to-leading order computations to the parton shower, and we present results from Sherpa for Drell-Yan lepton-pair and Higgs-boson production at the LHC.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, proceedings for Moriond QCD 201

Drell-Yan lepton pair production at NNLO QCD with parton showers

We present a simple approach to combine NNLO QCD calculations and parton showers, based on the UNLOPS technique. We apply the method to the computation of Drell-Yan lepton-pair production at the Large Hadron Collider. We comment on possible improvements and intrinsic uncertainties.Comment: 9 pages, 1 table, 3 figure

Hadronic final states in DIS with Sherpa

We present an extension of the multi-purpose Monte-Carlo event generator Sherpa for processes in deeply inelastic lepton-nucleon scattering. Hadronic final states in this kinematical setting are characterised by the presence of multiple kinematical scales, which were up to now accounted for only by specific resummations in individual kinematical regions. An extension of a known method for merging truncated parton showers with higher-order tree-level matrix elements allows to obtain predictions which are reliable in all kinematical limits.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures; Contribution to the XVIII International Workshop on Deep-Inelastic Scattering and Related Subjects, April 19-23, 2010, Firenze, Ital

Hard photon production and matrix-element parton-shower merging

We present a Monte-Carlo approach to prompt-photon production, where photons and QCD partons are treated democratically. The photon fragmentation function is modelled by an interleaved QCD+QED parton shower. This known technique is improved by including higher-order real-emission matrix elements. To this end, we extend a recently proposed algorithm for merging matrix elements and truncated parton showers. We exemplify the quality of the Monte-Carlo predictions by comparing them to measurements of the photon fragmentation function at LEP and to measurements of prompt photon and diphoton production from the Tevatron experiments.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures, revised version with minor update

W+n-jet predictions at NLO matched with a parton shower

The MC@NLO method as implemented in the Sherpa MC generator is presented using the production of W-bosons in conjunction with up to three jets as an example. Corresponding results computed at next-to leading order in QCD and including parton shower corrections are compared to recent experimental data from the Large Hadron Collider.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. To appear in the proceedings of DIS 201

Next-to-leading order matrix elements and truncated showers

An algorithm is presented that combines the ME+PS approach to merge sequences of tree-level matrix elements into inclusive event samples with the POWHEG method, which combines exact next-to-leading order matrix elements with parton showers. The quality of the approach and its implementation in Sherpa are exemplified by results for e+e- annihilation into hadrons at LEP, for Drell-Yan lepton-pair production at the Tevatron and for Higgs-boson and W+W- production at LHC energies.Comment: 5 pages, 8 figures; To appear in the proceedings of Physics at the LHC 2010, DESY, Hamburg, 7-12 June 201

Status of Monte-Carlo Event Generators

Recent progress on general-purpose Monte-Carlo event generators is reviewed with emphasis on the simulation of hard QCD processes and subsequent parton cascades. Describing full final states of high-energy particle collisions in contemporary experiments is an intricate task. Hundreds of particles are typically produced, and the reactions involve both large and small momentum transfer. The high-dimensional phase space makes an exact solution of the problem impossible. Instead, one typically resorts to regarding events as factorized into different steps, ordered descending in the mass scales or invariant momentum transfers which are involved. In this picture, a hard interaction, described through fixed-order perturbation theory, is followed by multiple Bremsstrahlung emissions off initial- and final-state and, finally, by the hadronization process, which binds QCD partons into color-neutral hadrons. Each of these steps can be treated independently, which is the basic concept inherent to general-purpose event generators. Their development is nowadays often focused on an improved description of radiative corrections to hard processes through perturbative QCD. In this context, the concept of jets is introduced, which allows to relate sprays of hadronic particles in detectors to the partons in perturbation theory. In this talk, we briefly review recent progress on perturbative QCD in event generation. The main focus lies on the general-purpose Monte-Carlo programs HERWIG, PYTHIA and SHERPA, which will be the workhorses for LHC phenomenology. A detailed description of the physics models included in these generators can be found in [8]. We also discuss matrix-element generators, which provide the parton-level input for general-purpose Monte Carlo

Resolved Photons in Sherpa

We present the first complete simulation framework, in the Sherpa event generator, for resolved photon interactions at next-to leading order accuracy. It includes photon spectra obtained through the equivalent-photon approximation, parton distribution functions to parametrize the hadronic structure of quasi-real photons, the matching of the parton shower to next-to leading order QCD calculations for resolved photon cross sections, and the modelling of multiple-parton interactions. We validate our framework against a wide range of photo-production data from LEP and HERA experiments, observing good overall agreement. We identify important future steps relevant for high-quality simulations at the planned Electron-Ion Collider

Soft evolution of multi-jet final states

We present a new framework for computing resummed and matched distributions in processes with many hard QCD jets. The intricate color structure of soft gluon emission at large angles renders resummed calculations highly non-trivial in this case. We automate all ingredients necessary for the color evolution of the soft function at next-to-leading-logarithmic accuracy, namely the selection of the color bases and the projections of color operators and Born amplitudes onto those bases. Explicit results for all QCD processes with up to $2\to 5$ partons are given. We also devise a new tree-level matching scheme for resummed calculations which exploits a quasi-local subtraction based on the Catani-Seymour dipole formalism. We implement both resummation and matching in the Sherpa event generator. As a proof of concept, we compute the resummed and matched transverse-thrust distribution for hadronic collisions.Comment: 39 pages, 10 figures. Extended sections 2.0, 2.5 and 3.2. Version accepted by JHE