Improved Monte Carlo Simulations of Massive Quarks

Abstract

Motivated by the interest in top and bottom quark production processes at the LHC, we study the simulation of heavy quarks in the Herwig 7 Monte Carlo event generator. We first present a much improved treatment of heavy quarks in the dipole shower in Herwig 7 and extend the shower to handle decays of massive coloured particles. Taking advantage of these developments, we perform an in-depth study of the simulation of top quark pair production at the LHC, paying particular attention to the parton shower and matching uncertainties involved. Next we implement an algorithm in the dipole shower to include spin correlation effects. Using this algorithm we can produce accurate predictions of the angular distributions of top quark decay products in top pair production at the LHC.

Following this we describe a modified version of the veto algorithm used in parton showers that enables the incorporation of weights. We show that the algorithm can be used to significantly reduce the CPU time required to evaluate the effects of scale variations in parton showers.

Finally, we investigate the description of gluon splittings to heavy quark pairs in the angular-ordered and dipole parton showers in Herwig 7. While both parton showers correctly reproduce the leading-logarithmic term in the description of these splittings, we find that the effects of subleading contributions are significant.