Parton showers and matching uncertainties in top quark pair production with Herwig 7

Author(s)
Kyle Cormier, Simon Plätzer, Christian Reuschle, Peter Richardson, Stephen Webster
Abstract

We evaluate the theoretical uncertainties in next-to-leading order plus parton shower predictions for top quark pair production and decay in hadronic collisions. Our work is carried out using the Herwig 7 event generator and presents an in-depth study of variations in matching schemes with two systematically different shower algorithms, the traditional angular-ordered and alternative dipole shower. We also present all of the required extensions of the Herwig dipole shower algorithm to properly take into account quark mass effects, as well as its ability to perform top quark decays. The predictions are compared at parton level as well as to LHC data, including in the boosted regime. We find that the regions where predictions with a non-top-quark-specific tune differ drastically from data are plagued by large uncertainties which are consistent between our two shower and matching algorithms.

Organisation(s)
Particle Physics
External organisation(s)
University of Toronto, Florida State University, Lund University, European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Durham University
Journal
European Physical Journal C
Volume
79
No. of pages
36
ISSN
1434-6044
Publication date
11-2019
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
103012 High energy physics
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Engineering (miscellaneous), Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)
Portal url
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/parton-showers-and-matching-uncertainties-in-top-quark-pair-production-with-herwig-7(25e04a75-89f8-4a55-8f5d-697622bf3281).html