Photon splitting corrections to soft-photon resummation

TL;DR

This paper develops an algorithm to include photon-splitting corrections at NNLO in QED into the Sherpa Monte-Carlo generator, significantly improving the accuracy of soft-photon resummation for particle decay simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to incorporate photon-splitting effects into soft-photon resummation, enhancing precision in QED simulations beyond standard approaches.

Findings

Photon-splitting corrections can cause up to 1% effects in inclusive scenarios.

Effects can reach up to 9% with photon-only dressing and large cones.

Different dressing strategies impact the size of photon-splitting effects.

Abstract

In this paper we present an algorithm to add photon-splitting corrections to the Yennie-Frautschi-Suura-style soft-photon resummation available in the Sherpa Monte-Carlo event generator. Photon-splitting corrections enter at NNLO in QED and, as these effects are not incorporated in the standard QED FSR resummations, their size is larger than the pure hard photon-emission corrections at the same order. We introduce different lepton dressing strategies which incorporate further leptons and hadrons in addition to the customary photons, and discuss their sensitivity to dressing parameters such as the cone size. Finally, we quantify the effects of photon splittings into charged fermions and scalars under different such dressing strategies on $Z\to e^+e^-$ decays and find effects of up to 1% for suitably inclusive dressing strategies independent of the dressing cone size, and up to 9% if only photons are used in the dressing procedure with large dressing cones.