Sector showers for hadron collisions

• Main Authors: Helen Brooks, Christian T Preuss, Peter Skands
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SpringerOpen 2020-07-01
• Series: Journal of High Energy Physics
• Subjects: QCD Phenomenology; Phenomenological Models
• Online Access: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/JHEP07(2020)032

Abstract In conventional parton showers (including ones based on dipoles/antennae), a given (Born + m)-parton configuration can typically be reached via O(m!) different “shower histories”. In the context of matrix-element-correction and merging procedures, accounting for these histories mandates fairly complex and resource-intensive algorithms. A so far little-explored alternative in the shower context is to divide the branching phase spaces into distinct “sectors”, each of which only receives contributions from a single branching kernel. This has a number of consequences including making the shower operator bijective; i.e., each parton configuration now has a single unique “inverse”. As a first step towards developing a full-fledged matrix-element-correction and merging procedure based on such showers, we here extend the sector approach for antenna showers to hadron-hadron collisions, including mass and helicity dependence.