Electroweak parton shower for high-energy particle collisions

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Electroweak corrections to particle reactions at high-energy colliders such as the LHC become increasingly important at energies well above the electroweak scale and reach several 10% in the TeV energy range. The dominant electroweak corrections are connected to the exchange or emission of electroweak gauge bosons and are of universal origin. While the leading virtual corrections are known at the one- and two-loop level in analytic form and mostly included in predictions (at least at the one-loop level), the real corrections induced by heavy-particle emission are most often neglected or left to background calculations carried out by experimentalists with leading-order Monte Carlo generators. This project aims at the development of a complete electroweak parton shower, which simulates massive-particle emission in a process-independent way, and the implementation of the shower in the multi-purpose Monte Carlo event generator SHERPA. The shower will be properly validated by detailed comparisons of cross-section predictions based on the shower on the one hand and on full matrix elements on the other. Moreover, the intrinsic precision of the shower will be investigated by varying the starting scale, the recoil scheme, and the ending condition of the shower. This project will improve the accuracy of theoretical predictions and our understanding of electroweak corrections to collider processes, will be beneficial to both the theory and experimental communities in particle physics, and will contribute to push theoretical predictions towards global percent accuracy.