Higgs Production: A Comparison of Parton Showers and Resummation

Abstract

The search for the Higgs boson(s) is one of the major priorities at the upgraded Fermilab Tevatron and at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Monte Carlo event generators (MCs) are heavily utilized to extract and interpret the Higgs signal, which depends on the details of the multiple soft-gluon emission from the initial state partons in hadronic collisions. Thus, it is crucial to establish the reliability of the MCs used by the experimentalists. In this paper, the MC based parton shower formalism is compared to that of an analytic resummation calculation. Theoretical input, predictions and, where they exist, data for the transverse momentum distribution of Higgs bosons, $Z^0$ bosons, and photon pairs are compared for the Tevatron and the LHC. This comparison is useful in understanding the strengths and the weaknesses of the different theoretical approaches, and in testing their reliability.