VINCIA for hadron colliders

Abstract

We present the first public implementation of antenna-based QCD initial- and final-state showers. The shower kernels are 2 → 3 antenna functions, which capture not only the collinear dynamics but also the leading soft (coherent) singularities of QCD matrix elements. We define the evolution measure to be inversely proportional to the leading poles, hence gluon emissions are evolved in a p⊥measure inversely proportional to the eikonal, while processes that only contain a single pole (e.g., g→ qq¯) are evolved in virtuality. Non-ordered emissions are allowed, suppressed by an additional power of 1 / Q2. Recoils and kinematics are governed by exact on-shell 2 → 3 phase-space factorisations. This first implementation is limited to massless QCD partons and colourless resonances. Tree-level matrix-element corrections are included for QCD up to O(αs4) (4 jets), and for Drell–Yan and Higgs production up to O(αs3) (V / H + 3 jets). The resulting algorithm has been made publicly available in Vincia 2.0.