NNLO+PS W+W− production using jet veto resummation at NNLL′

Abstract

Abstract We construct a novel event generator for the process $$ pp\to {\ell}^{-}{\overline{\nu}}_{\ell }{\ell^{\prime}}^{+}{\nu}_{\ell^{\prime }} $$ pp → ℓ − ν ¯ ℓ ℓ ′ + ν ℓ ′ , which matches fixed-order predictions at next-to-next-to-leading order in the strong coupling to a parton shower program. The matching is achieved using the Geneva method, in this case exploiting a resummed calculation for the hardest jet transverse momentum at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy obtained via soft-collinear effective theory and implemented in the C++ library SCETlib. This choice of resolution variable ensures that the introduction of a jet veto, commonly used by experimental analyses to reject multi-jet background events, does not result in the appearance of unmitigated large logarithms for low veto scales before showering. After validating our partonic results against publicly available fixed order and resummed calculations, we compare our predictions to measurements taken at the ATLAS and CMS experiments, finding good agreement. This is the first NNLO+PS accurate event generator to use the hardest jet transverse momentum as a resolution variable.