Initial State Radiation in Simulations of Vector Boson Production at Hadron Colliders

TL;DR

This paper enhances parton shower simulations of vector boson production at hadron colliders by incorporating matrix-element corrections to initial-state radiation, improving accuracy and agreement with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces matrix-element corrections to initial-state radiation in HERWIG, improving the simulation of Drell-Yan processes and making predictions for LHC jet events.

Findings

Improved agreement with Tevatron data

Enhanced simulation accuracy for initial-state radiation

Predictions for LHC jet events

Abstract

The production of vector bosons at present and future hadron colliders will provide a crucial test for QCD and Standard Model physics. In this paper we improve parton shower simulations of Drell-Yan processes by implementing matrix-element corrections to the initial-state radiation. We apply our work to the HERWIG Monte Carlo event generator and compare our phenomenological results with the ones obtained using the previous version of HERWIG, with resummed calculations which we match to the exact first-order perturbative result, and with recent Tevatron data. We also make some predictions for jet events at the LHC.