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 αs 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 W+W- pairs.
- Publication:
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Journal of High Energy Physics
- Pub Date:
- June 2002
- DOI:
- 10.1088/1126-6708/2002/06/029
- arXiv:
- arXiv:hep-ph/0204244
- Bibcode:
- 2002JHEP...06..029F
- Keywords:
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- High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
- E-Print:
- 69 pages Latex