QEDXQCD Exponentiation and Shower/ME Matching at the LHC

This talk reports on various aspects of the divergence of perturbative expansions in the context of matching QCD onto heavy quark effective theory. Implications for exclusive and inclusive decays of heavy mesons are discussed.

Shower Monte Carlo event generators have played an important role in particle physics. Modern experiments would hardly be possible without them. In this talk I discuss how QCD physics is incorporated into the mathematical structure of these programs and I outline recent developments including matching between events with different numbers of hard jets and the inclusion of next-to-leading order effects.

The first step of any QFT calculation, aiming at phenomenological predictions, is the matching of the theory to Nature. The matching procedure fixes the parameters of the theory in terms of an equal number of external inputs that, if the theory is expected to reproduce observations, must be experimentally measured physical quantities. At the sub-percent level of accuracy QED radiative corrections become important and the theory expected to describe the hadronic Universe is QC...

I briefly review some recent results on soft-gluon resummation and present applications to heavy-quark and jet production in hadron collisions.

We develop and prove the theory of the QCD extension of the YFS Monte Carlo approach to higher order QED radiative corrections. As a corollary, a new approach to quantum gravity by one of us (B.F.L.W.) is illustrated. Semi-analytical results and preliminary explicit Monte Carlo data are presented for the processes p-bar p -> t-bar t + X at FNAL energies. We comment briefly on the implications of our results on the CDF/D0 observations and on RHIC/LHC physics.

We present a study of effects of QCD radiation in the production of heavy colored states, employing inclusive multi-jet samples obtained by matching matrix elements and parton showers. We discuss several examples showing that matched samples are in general not only more accurate than a parton shower alone, but also often indispensable to make reliable predictions of beyond the Standard Model signals.

This thesis discusses recent advances in precision calculations of quantum chromodynamics and their application to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) physics program and beyond.

We describe the \POWHEGBOX{} package, a general computer code framework for implementing NLO calculations in Shower Monte Carlo programs according to the \POWHEG{} method.

This contribution provides a pedagogical introduction to and review of the current status and ongoing progress in the development of Monte Carlo tools for the calculation and simulation of high-Q^2 processes in hadronic collisions.

Advances in perturbative QCD techniques have been crucial for the successful interpretation of the data collected in Run I of LHC, and for the discovery of the Higgs boson. I will very briefly highlight some recent additions to the QCD toolbox, and note how these new tools are likely to be essential for future precision physics, both in Run II at the LHC, and in view of future hadron and lepton colliders.