Matching NLO QCD computations and parton shower simulations
Abstract
We propose a method for matching the next-to-leading order (NLO) calculation of a given QCD process with a parton shower Monte Carlo (MC) simulation. The method has the following features: fully exclusive events are generated, with hadronization according to the MC model; total exclusive rates are accurate to NLO; NLO results for distributions are recovered upon expansion in ; 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; and matching between the hard- and soft/collinear-emission regions is smooth. A fraction of events with negative weight is generated, but unweighting remains possible with reasonable efficiency. The method is clarified using a simple toy model, and illustrated by application to the hadroproduction of WW pairs.
Cite
@article{arxiv.hep-ph/0204244,
title = {Matching NLO QCD computations and parton shower simulations},
author = {S. Frixione and B. R. Webber},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/0204244},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
69 pages Latex; 16 figures included. Minor modifications to the text, three references added