Eur. Phys. J. C (2008) 53: 473-500
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-007-0490-5

Special Article - Tools for Experiment and Theory

Comparative study of various algorithms for the merging of parton showers and matrix elements in hadronic collisions

¹ SLAC, Menlo Park, USA
² IPPP, Durham, UK
³ Department of Theoretical Physics, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
⁴ Centre for Particle Physics and Phenomenology (CP3), Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain, Belgium
⁵ Physics Department, CERN, 1211, Geneva 23, Switzerland
⁶ Dipartimento di Fisica and INFN, Ferrara, Italy
⁷ Institute of Nuclear Physics, NCSR Demokritos, Athens, Greece
⁸ INFN, Pavia, Italy
⁹ Institut für Theoretische Physik, TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany
¹⁰ ITP, Karlsruhe University, Karlsruhe, Germany
¹¹ Institute of Physics, University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland

^* e-mail: michelangelo.mangano@cern.ch

Received: 21 June 2007
Revised: 30 September 2007
Published online: 15 December 2007

Abstract

We compare different procedures for combining fixed-order tree-level matrix-element generators with parton showers. We use the case of W-production at the Tevatron and the LHC to compare different implementations of the so-called CKKW and MLM schemes using different matrix-element generators and different parton cascades. We find that although similar results are obtained in all cases, there are important differences.