Towards NNLO plus PS matching with sector showers

We outline a new technique for the fully-differential matching of final-state parton showers to NNLO calculations, focussing here on the simplest case of leptonic collisions with two final-state jets. The strategy is facilitated by working in the antenna formalism, making use of NNLO antenna subtraction on the fixed-order side and the sector-antenna framework on the shower side. As long as the combined real-virtual and double-real corrections do not overcompensate the real-emission term in the three-jet region, negative weights can be eliminated from the matching scheme. We describe the implementation of all necessary components in the VINCIA antenna shower in PyTHIA 8.3. (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP3.

Automated summary

We propose a new technique for fully-differential matching of final-state parton showers to NNLO calculations, focusing on the case of leptonic collisions with two final-state jets. The strategy is enabled by using the antenna formalism for NNLO antenna subtraction and the sector-antenna framework for the shower. Negative weights can be eliminated from the matching scheme as long as the combined real-virtual and double-real corrections do not overcompensate the real-emission term in the three-jet region. We describe the implementation of all necessary components in the VINCIA antenna shower in PyTHIA 8.3.