BSM WW production with a jet veto

by Nikolas Kauer

Monday 13 Jan 2020, 14:15 → 15:15 Europe/Berlin

313 (Main)

The impact on WW production of the unique dimension-six operator coupling gluons to the Higgs field is considered. In order to study this process, one has to appropriately model the effect of a veto on additional jets. This requires the resummation of large logarithms of the ratio of the maximum jet transverse momentum and the invariant mass of the W boson pair. Such resummation is performed at the appropriate accuracy for the Standard Model (SM) background and for a signal beyond the SM (BSM), and a simple method to interface jet-veto resummations with fixed-order event generators is devised. The fast numerical code MCFM-RE, the Resummation Edition of the fixed-order code MCFM, is presented. Our resummed predictions are compared with parton-shower event generators and the size of effects, such as limited detector acceptances, hadronisation and the underlying event, that were not included in our resummation, are assessed. The code is then used to compare the sensitivity of WW and ZZ production at the HL-LHC to the considered higher-dimension operator. We find that WW can provide complementary sensitivity with respect to ZZ, provided one is able to control theory uncertainties at the percent level. Our method is general and can be applied to the production of any colour singlet, both within and beyond the SM.