Positive-weight moment matching at NNLO and beyond
Abstract
Parton-shower simulations at state-of-the-art perturbative accuracy carry many negative event weights, which dilute their statistical power. For many purposes, this makes them unusable. We formulate a method for the generation of positive-weighted event samples which reproduce, up to a controllable approximation, suites of IR-safe observables with the highest perturbative accuracy of any available calculation. This method is arbitrarily differential in phase space, and free from unphysical artefacts such as binning-dependence. Applied to a leading-order Pythia sample, the method gives simultaneous NNLO accuracy for Drell--Yan and Z+jet observables in a positive-weighted event sample, for the first time. The method generalises immediately to higher orders of perturbation theory, higher multiplicities, and other processes, observables, and event generators.
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BibTeX
@misc{assi2026positiveweight,
title = {{Positive-weight moment matching at NNLO and beyond}},
author = {Benoît Assi and Rene Poncelet and James Whitehead},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.38712},
eprint = {2610.38712},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38712},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Positive-weight moment matching at NNLO and beyond
AU - Benoît Assi
AU - Rene Poncelet
AU - James Whitehead
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/28
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.38712
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38712
AB - Parton-shower simulations at state-of-the-art perturbative accuracy carry many negative event weights, which dilute their statistical power. For many purposes, this makes them unusable. We formulate a method for the generation of positive-weighted event samples which reproduce, up to a controllable approximation, suites of IR-safe observables with the highest perturbative accuracy of any available calculation. This method is arbitrarily differential in phase space, and free from unphysical artefacts such as binning-dependence. Applied to a leading-order Pythia sample, the method gives simultaneous NNLO accuracy for Drell--Yan and Z+jet observables in a positive-weighted event sample, for the first time. The method generalises immediately to higher orders of perturbation theory, higher multiplicities, and other processes, observables, and event generators.
ER -