2002/04/30 by S. Frixione, B. R. Webber · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2002/06/029
published as JHEP 0206:029,2002 · 69 pages Latex; 16 figures included. Minor modifications to the text, three references added
arxiv created 2002/07/12 · arxiv updated 2010/11/11
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.