Parton-shower matching for electroweak corrections
Final Report Abstract
Within the project we have improved the theoretical prediction for one of the most important processes at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Our improvements for the inclusive Drell–Yan processes, i.e. the production of pairs of leptons from proton collisions, are most relevant for precision measurements at the LHC, e.g. the precision measurement of the mass of the W boson. We have employed the P OWHEG framework which allows to combine precision predictions for inclusive event rates with general parton-shower tools which are used to simulate the proton-proton collision as a whole. In particular, we have employed the so-called parton-shower matching within the POWHEG method to include electroweak corrections at next-to-leading order in perturbation theory. Scrutinizing existing work in the literature, we realized that the resonant production and the subsequent decay of weak vector bosons need additional improvements beyond the standard POWHEG framework. To our surprise, these resonance improvements had been overlooked in the existing literature on the Drell–Yan process, so that we adapted the focus of the project to investigate and understand the related issues. Hence, we were able to work out the technical aspects of the resonance improvements as well as their phenomenological implications for precision measurements.
Publications
- Parton Shower Matching for Electroweak Corrections, PhD thesis Fakultät für Mathematik, Informatik und Naturwissenschaften, RWTH Aachen University
L. Oymanns
- Resonance-improved parton-shower matching for the Drell–Yan process including electroweak corrections, JHEP 1705 (2017) 090
A. Mück and L. Oymanns
