Matching and Merging

• A formal order-by-order perturbative calculation, in each order higher including graphs both with one particle more in the final state and with one loop more in the intermediate state. This is accurate to the order of the calculation, but gives no hint of event structures beyond that, with more particles in the final state. Today next-to-leading order (NLO) is standard, while next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) is coming. This approach thus is limited to few orders, and also breaks down in soft and collinear regions, which makes it unsuitable for matching to hadronization.
• Real emissions to several higher orders, but neglecting the virtual/loop corrections that should go with it at any given order. Thereby it is possible to allow for topologies with a large and varying number of partons, at the prize of not being accurate to any particular order. The approach also opens up for doublecounting, and as above breaks down in soft and colliner regions.
• The parton shower provides an approximation to higher orders, both real and virtual contributions for the emission of arbitrarily many particles. As such it is less accurate than either of the two above, at least for topologies of well separated partons, but it contains a physically sensible behaviour in the soft and collinear limits, and therefore matches well onto the hadronization stage.

The common traits of all combination methods are that matrix elements are used to describe the production of hard and well separated particles, and parton showers for the production of soft or collinear particles. What differs between the various approaches that have been proposed are which matrix elements are being used, how doublecounting is avoided, and how the transition from the hard to the soft regime is handled. These combination methods are typically referred to as "matching" or "merging" algorithms. There is some confusion about the distinction between the two terms, and so we leave it to the inventor/implementor of a particular scheme to choose and motivate the name given to that scheme.

PYTHIA comes with methods, to be described next, that implement or support several different kind of algorithms. The field is open-ended, however: any external program can feed in Les Houches events that PYTHIA subsequently showers, adds multiparton interactions to, and hadronizes. These events afterwards can be reweighted and combined in any desired way. The maximum pT of the shower evolution is set by the Les Houches scale, on the one hand, and by the values of the SpaceShower:pTmaxMatch, TimeShower:pTmaxMatch and other parton-shower settings, on the other. Typically it is not possible to achieve perfect matching this way, given that the PYTHIA pT evolution variables are not likely to agree with the variables used for cuts in the external program. Often one can get close enough with simple means but, for an improved matching, User Hooks can be inserted to control the steps taken on the way, e.g. to veto those parton shower branchings that would doublecount emissions included in the matrix elements.

Zooming in from the "anything goes" perspective, the list of relevent approaches actively supported is as follows.

• For many/most resonance decays the first branching in the shower is merged with first-order matrix elements [Ben87, Nor01]. This means that the emission rate is accurate to NLO, similarly to the POWHEG strategy (see below), but built into the timelike showers. The angular orientation of the event after the first emission is only handled by the parton shower kinematics, however. Needless to say, this formalism is precisely what is tested by Z^0 decays at LEP1, and it is known to do a pretty good job there.
• Also the spacelike showers contain a correction to first-order matrix elements, but only for the one-body-final-state processes q qbar -> gamma^*/Z^0/W^+-/h^0/H^0/A0/Z'0/W'+-/R0 [Miu99] and g g -> h^0/H^0/A0, and only to leading order. That is, it is equivalent to the POWHEG formalism for the real emission, but the prefactor "cross section normalization" is LO rather than NLO. Therefore this framework is less relevant, and has been superseded the following ones.
• The POWHEG strategy [Nas04] provides a cross section accurate to NLO. The hardest emission is constructed with unit probability, based on the ratio of the real-emission matrix element to the Born-level cross section, and with a Sudakov factor derived from this ratio, i.e. the philosophy introduced in [Ben87].
  While POWHEG is a generic strategy, the POWHEG BOX [Ali] is an explicit framework, within which several processes are available. Potential emissions are ordered in a transverse-momentum-related variable. The LHA scale variable encodes this value for each event, and thereby sets the upper limit for subsequent shower emissions. There is a mismatch between the POWHEG BOX and the PYTHIA pT variables, however, which gives imperfections in the transition region [Cor10]. The proposed solution is to allow showers to cover the full phase space, but then veto emissions in the region already covered by the POWHEG BOX evolution. The code required for this can be found in examples/main31. While fairly general, the code would have to be modified to accommodate a different pT scale definition in the POWHEG BOX.
• The other traditional approach for NLO calculations is the MC@NLO one [Fri02]. In it the shower emission probability, without its Sudakov factor, is subtracted from the real-emission matrix element to regularize divergences. It therefore requires a analytic knowledge of the way the shower populates phase space. Currently there is no MC@NLO implementation for PYTHIA 8, but one is in preparation by Paolo Torrielli and Stefano Frixione, for the aMC@NLO program [Fre11]. The global-recoil option of the PYTHIA final-state shower has been constructed in anticipation of its use for the above-mentioned subtraction.
• Multi-jet merging in the CKKW-L approach [Lon01] is directly available. Its implementation, relevant parameters and test programs are documented on a separate page.
• Multi-jet matching in the MLM approach [Man02, Man07] is also available, either based on the ALPGEN or on the Madgraph variant, and with input events either from ALPGEN or from Madgraph. For details see separate page.
• Unitarised matrix element + parton shower merging (UMEPS) is directly available. Its implementation, relevant parameters and test programs are documented on a separate page.
• Next-to-leading order multi-jet merging (in the NL3 and UNLOPS approaches) is directly available. Its implementation, relevant parameters and test programs are documented on a separate page.