Monte Carlo simulations of hard QCD radiation

Abstract

Monte Carlo event generators, such as Herwig++, provide a full simulation of events at collider experiments. They give a fully exclusive description of hadronic final states and are therefore crucial tools for the planning of future experiments and analysing of data from existing experiments.

The key component that allows this description of high-multiplicity final states is the parton shower. There has been much recent progress improving the parton shower description of hard radiation using exact matrix elements. This thesis describes research into implementing and improving such methods within the Herwig++ event generator.

In Chapter 1, the parton-shower formalism is reviewed and the structure of event generators described. Chapter 2 details the specifics of the parton shower.

In Chapters 3 and 4, the POWHEG next-to-leading-order matching procedure is described, and work implementing the scheme within Herwig++ is presented. The method is implemented for the processes e+e- to hadrons and Drell-Yan vector boson production and the results are compared to experimental data from LEP and the Tevatron. This work includes the first full implementation of the truncated shower.

A description of the development and implementation of a modified matrix-element merging scheme is presented in Chapter 5. This scheme is based on CKKW merging but uses an extension of the POWHEG idea to improve the method using truncated showers. The method is implemented first for final-state radiation in e+e- to hadrons and then, in Chapter 6, extended to include initial-state radiation in Drell-Yan vector boson production.