A proposal for a standard interface between Monte Carlo tools and one-loop programs

Abstract

Many highly developed Monte Carlo tools for the evaluation of cross sections based on tree matrix elements exist and are used by experimental collaborations in high energy physics. As the evaluation of one-loop matrix elements has recently been undergoing enormous progress, the combination of one-loop matrix elements with existing Monte Carlo tools is on the horizon. This would lead to phenomenological predictions at the next-toleading order level. This note summarises the discussion of the next-to-leading order multileg (NLM) working group on this issue which has been taking place during the workshop on Physics at TeV colliders at Les Houches, France, in June 2009. The result is a proposal for a standard interface between Monte Carlo tools and one-loop matrix element programs.Dedicated to the memory of, and in tribute to, Thomas Binoth, who led the effort to develop this proposal for Les Houches 2009. Thomas led the discussions, set up the subgroups, collected the contributions, and wrote and edited this paper. He made a promise that the paper would be on the arXiv the first week of January, and we are faithfully fulfilling his promise. In his honour, we would like to call this the Binoth Les Houches Accord.

Automation of one-loop QCD computations

“…Likewise, MadLoop can be called by any code compatible with the accord of ref. [3]. It is also appropriate to remind the reader that in the first paper on MadFKS (ref.…”

“…Secondly, the choice of which processes to consider is essentially limited only by CPU-time considerations. 1 It is important to keep in mind that MadFKS and MadLoop are fully independent modules, which communicate with a standardized interface as prescribed by the Binoth-Les Houches accord [3]. MadFKS has already employed several programs other than MadLoop for the computation of one-loop contributions: BlackHat [4], Rocket [5], and Samurai [6] (see e.g.…”

Scaling patterns for QCD jets

“…However, over the past few years this field has progressed enormously. As a consequence for Standard Model processes a similar level of automation as for leadingorder calculations is within reach [34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43]. An approach applicable for general New Physics extensions, though limited to 2 → 2 processes, has been presented in [44,45].…”

One-loop calculations in quantum field theory: From Feynman diagrams to unitarity cuts

“…In the spirit of Refs. [123,124] it is possible to interface the one-loop calculation with a tool that provides the real emission corrections, the subtraction terms, and can carry out the phase space integration. Such an approach has been used recently to compute the NLO QCD corrections to five jet production in e + e − annihilation where one-loop amplitudes, calculated with generalized unitarity, were interfaced with Madevent/MadFKS [10].…”