Matching fully differential NNLO calculations and parton showers

A bstract We present a general method to match fully differential next-to-next-to-leading-order (NNLO) calculations to parton shower programs. We discuss in detail the perturbative accuracy criteria a complete NNLO + PS matching has to satisfy. Our method is based on consistently improving a given NNLO calculation with the leading-logarithmic (LL) resummation in a chosen jet resolution variable. The resulting NNLO + LL calculation is cast in the form of an event generator for physical events that can be directly interfaced with a parton shower routine, and we give an explicit construction of the input “Monte Carlo cross sections” satisfying all required criteria. We also show how other proposed approaches naturally arise as special cases in our method.