MiNNLOPS: a new method to match NNLO QCD to parton showers

Abstract

We present a novel method to combine QCD calculations at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) with parton shower (PS) simulations, that can be applied to the production of heavy systems in hadronic collisions, such as colour singlets or a tt¯ pair. The NNLO corrections are included by connecting the MiNLO′ method with transverse- momentum resummation, and they are calculated at generation time without any additional reweighting, making the algorithm considerably efficient. Moreover, the combination of different jet multiplicities does not require any unphysical merging scale, and the matching preserves the structure of the leading logarithmic corrections of the Monte Carlo simulation for parton showers ordered in transverse momentum. We present proof-of-concept applications to hadronic Higgs production and the Drell-Yan process at the LHC.