Eur. Phys. J. C (2011) 71: 1670
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-011-1670-x

Special Article - Tools for Experiment and Theory

W ⁺ W ⁺ plus dijet production in the POWHEG BOX

¹ Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford, 1 Keble Road, Oxford, UK
² INFN, Sezione di Milano Bicocca, Milan, Italy

^* e-mail: g.zanderighi1@physics.ox.ac.uk

Received: 21 March 2011
Published online: 9 June 2011

Abstract

We present an implementation of the calculation of the production of W ⁺ W ⁺ plus two jets at hadron colliders, at next-to-leading order (NLO) in QCD, in the POWHEG framework, which is a method that allows the interfacing of NLO calculations to shower Monte Carlo programs. This is the first 2→4 process to be described to NLO accuracy within a shower Monte Carlo framework. The implementation was built within the POWHEG BOX package. We discuss a few technical improvements that were needed in the POWHEG BOX to deal with the computer intensive nature of the NLO calculation, and argue that further improvements are possible, so that the method can match the complexity that is reached today in NLO calculations. We have interfaced our POWHEG implementation with PYTHIA and HERWIG, and present some phenomenological results, discussing similarities and differences between the pure NLO and the POWHEG+PYTHIA calculation both for inclusive and more exclusive distributions. We have made the relevant code available at the POWHEG BOX web site.