Top-pair production at the LHC with MiNNLO$_{\rm PS}$

TL;DR

This paper develops a method to accurately simulate top-quark pair production at the LHC by combining NNLO calculations with parton showers, providing a tool that matches experimental data well.

Contribution

It introduces the MiNNLO method for NNLO+PS matching and implements it for top-quark pair production, including decay and spin correlations.

Findings

Excellent agreement with LHC data across multiple observables

First NNLO+PS event generator for top-quark pairs with full decay and spin effects

Open-source code available in POWHEG-BOX

Abstract

We consider the production of a pair of heavy quarks and illustrate the derivation of the MiNNLO method to match next-to-next-to-leading order calculations with parton showers (NNLO+PS) for this class of processes. As a first application, we construct an event generator for the fully differential simulation of hadronic top-quark pair production at NNLO+PS and discuss all details of its implementation in a parton shower Monte Carlo framework. We present new phenomenological results for the Large Hadron Collider obtained by including the tree-level decays of the top quarks, while accounting for spin-correlation effects. A comprehensive comparison to LHC measurements shows an excellent description of experimental data across multiple hadronic and leptonic particle-level observables. The computer code is available for download within the POWHEG-BOX.