Towards a fully massive five-flavour scheme

Abstract

In this work we explore first necessary steps to contruct a fully massive version of a variable flavour number scheme. In particular we focus, as an example, on an extension of the five-flavour scheme, where instead of neglecting explicit initial state quark mass effects, we retain all massive dependence, while keeping the resummation properties of the massless five-flavour scheme. We name this scheme five-flavour-massive (5FMS) scheme. Apart from consistently modified parton distribution functions, we provide all the ingredients that are needed to implement this scheme at MC@NLO accuracy, in a Monte Carlo event generator. As proof of concept we implement this scheme in SHERPA, and perfom a comparison of the new scheme with traditional ones for the simple process of scalar particle production in bottom quark fusion.