Positive-weight moment matching at NNLO and beyond

Abstract

Parton-shower simulations at state-of-the-art perturbative accuracy carry many negative event weights, which dilute their statistical power. For many purposes, this makes them unusable. We formulate a method for the generation of positive-weighted event samples which reproduce, up to a controllable approximation, suites of IR-safe observables with the highest perturbative accuracy of any available calculation. This method is arbitrarily differential in phase space, and free from unphysical artefacts such as binning-dependence. Applied to a leading-order Pythia sample, the method gives simultaneous NNLO accuracy for Drell--Yan and $Z+\text{jet}$ observables in a positive-weighted event sample, for the first time. The method generalises immediately to higher orders of perturbation theory, higher multiplicities, and other processes, observables, and event generators.

arXiv comment9 pages, 5 figures