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Hirschi, Valentin

Publications and source records attributed to Hirschi, Valentin.

Event generators for high-energy physics experiments

We provide an overview of the status of Monte-Carlo event generators for high-energy particle physics. Guided by the experimental needs and requirements, we highlight areas of active development, and opportunities for future improvements. Particular emphasis is given to physics models and algorithms that are employed across a variety of experiments. These common themes in event generator development lead to a more comprehensive understanding of physics at the highest energies and intensities, and allow models to be tested against a wealth of data that have been accumulated over the past decades. A cohesive approach to event generator development will allow these models to be further improved and systematic uncertainties to be reduced, directly contributing to future experimental success. Event generators are part of a much larger ecosystem of computational tools. They typically involve a number of unknown model parameters that must be tuned to experimental data, while maintaining the integrity of the underlying physics models. Making both these data, and the analyses with which they have been obtained accessible to future users is an essential aspect of open science and data preservation. It ensures the consistency of physics models across a variety of experiments.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

NLO predictions for the production of a spin-two particle at the LHC

We obtain predictions accurate at the next-to-leading order in QCD for the production of a generic spin-two particle in the most relevant channels at the LHC: production in association with coloured particles (inclusive, one jet, two jets and $t\bar t$), with vector bosons ($Z,W^\pm,\gamma$) and with the Higgs boson. Here, we present total and differential cross sections as well as branching ratios as a function of the mass and the collision energy also considering the case of non-universal couplings to standard model particles. We find that the next-to-leading order corrections give rise to sizeable $K$ factors for many channels, in some cases exposing the unitarity-violating behaviour of non-universal couplings scenarios, and in general greatly reduce the theoretical uncertainties. Our predictions are publicly available in the MadGraph5_aMC@NLO framework and can, therefore, be directly used in experimental simulations of spin-two particle production for arbitrary values of the mass and couplings.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Tensor integrand reduction via Laurent expansion

We introduce a new method for the application of one-loop integrand reduction via the Laurent expansion algorithm, as implemented in the public C++ library Ninja. We show how the coefficients of the Laurent expansion can be computed by suitable contractions of the loop numerator tensor with cut-dependent projectors, making it possible to interface Ninja to any one-loop matrix element generator that can provide the components of this tensor. We implemented this technique in the Ninja library and interfaced it to MadLoop, which is part of the public MadGraph5_aMC@NLO framework. We performed a detailed performance study, comparing against other public reduction tools, namely CutTools, Samurai, IREGI, PJFry++ and Golem95. We find that Ninja out-performs traditional integrand reduction in both speed and numerical stability, the latter being on par with that of the tensor integral reduction tool Golem95 which is however more limited and slower than Ninja. Lastly, we considered many benchmark multi-scale processes of increasing complexity, involving QCD and electro-weak corrections as well as effective non-renormalizable couplings, showing that Ninja’s performance scales well with both the rank and multiplicity of the considered process.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Spin polarisation of tt¯γγ production at NLO+PS with GoSam interfaced to MadGraph5_aMC@NLO

Here, we present an interface between the multipurpose Monte Carlo tool MadGraph5_aMC@NLO and the automated amplitude generator GoSam. As a first application of this novel framework, we compute the NLO corrections to pp→ tt¯H and pp→ tt¯γγ matched to a parton shower. In the phenomenological analyses of these processes, we focus our attention on observables which are sensitive to the polarisation of the top quarks.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Matching next-to-leading order predictions to parton showers in supersymmetric QCD

We present a fully automated framework based on the FeynRules and MadGraph5_aMC@NLO programs that allows for accurate simulations of supersymmetric QCD processes at the LHC. Starting directly from a model Lagrangian that features squark and gluino interactions, event generation is achieved at the next-to-leading order in QCD, matching short-distance events to parton showers and including the subsequent decay of the produced supersymmetric particles. As an application, we study the impact of higher-order corrections in gluino pair-production in a simplified benchmark scenario inspired by current gluino LHC searches.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Automated event generation for loop-induced processes

We present the first fully automated implementation of cross-section computation and event generation for loop-induced processes. This work is integrated in the MadGraph5_aMC@NLO framework. We describe the optimisations implemented at the level of the matrix element evaluation, phase space integration and event generation allowing for the simulation of large multiplicity loop-induced processes. Along with some selected differential observables, we illustrate our results with a table showing inclusive cross-sections for all loop-induced hadronic scattering processes with up to three final states in the SM as well as for some relevant 2 → 4 processes. Furthermore, many of these are computed here for the first time.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗