Electroweak W+W-jj prodution at NLO in QCD matched with parton shower in the POWHEG-BOX

TL;DR

This paper implements electroweak W+W-jj production at hadron colliders within the POWHEG framework, combining NLO QCD calculations with parton shower simulations, and explores its phenomenological implications in various scenarios.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel implementation of electroweak W+W-jj production at NLO in QCD matched with parton shower in the POWHEG-BOX, including decay modes, resonant contributions, and spin correlations.

Findings

Parton shower effects vary with setup and observable.

Distributions related to central-jet veto are highly sensitive.

Radiation impacts NLO predictions differently depending on the scenario.

Abstract

We present an implementation of electroweak W+W-jj production at hadron colliders in the POWHEG framework, a method that allows the interfacing of a next-to-leading order QCD calculation with parton shower Monte Carlo programs. We provide results for both, fully and semi-leptonic decay modes of the weak bosons, taking resonant and non-resonant contributions and spin correlations of the final-state particles into account. To illustrate the versatility of our implementation, we provide phenomenological results for two representative scenarios with a light and with a heavy Higgs boson, respectively, and in a kinematic regime of highly boosted gauge bosons. The impact of the parton shower is found to depend on the setup and the observable under investigation. In particular, distributions related to a central-jet veto are more sensitive to these effects. Therefore the impact of radiation by the parton shower on next-to-leading order predictions should be assessed carefully on a case-by-case basis.