Gauge-Invariant Longitudinal Modes in the Herwig 7 Electroweak Parton Shower

TL;DR

This paper develops a gauge-invariant scheme for modeling longitudinal electroweak gauge bosons in Herwig 7, improving theoretical consistency and providing a switchable implementation that affects low-scale predictions.

Contribution

It introduces a gauge-invariant treatment of longitudinal modes in electroweak showers, with derived helicity-resolved kernels and an implementation in Herwig 7.

Findings

Default and gauge-invariant schemes agree at high scales.

Differences emerge at lower scales where symmetry breaking is active.

Observable shifts are controlled and interpretable in multi-emission studies.

Abstract

Longitudinal electroweak gauge bosons are the most technically delicate ingredient of electroweak parton showers: in the broken Standard Model, the gauge component of a longitudinal polarisation does not cancel diagram by diagram, but is related by Ward identities to amplitudes with an insertion of the associated would-be Goldstone field. Building on the default Herwig 7 treatment based on a subtraction-defined longitudinal current, we construct a gauge-invariant scheme in which the subtraction remainder is retained as a well-defined contribution and completed by a Ward-identity-fixed Goldstone-matching term. We derive helicity-resolved building blocks and compact quasi-collinear splitting kernels for $q\to q'V$ and $V\to V'V''$ branchings, and implement the scheme in Herwig 7 as a switchable alternative to the default basis. The completion leaves the transverse sector unchanged and modifies only longitudinal entries through controlled symmetry-breaking terms, including Yukawa-sensitive contributions in massive-fermion channels. In shower-level studies, we find that the default and gauge-invariant prescriptions coincide at high evolution scales, while differing at lower scales precisely in channels where symmetry breaking is active. Exclusive single-emission observables can moreover display non-monotonic scheme dependence once Sudakov suppression and kinematic constraints are accounted for. A first multi-emission LHC-like study confirms numerical stability and yields controlled, interpretable shifts in observables that probe propagating electroweak shower currents, whereas quantities dominated by promptly contracted, near on-shell vector-boson matrix elements remain largely unchanged.