Higgs boson production:: A comparison of parton showers and resummation -: art. no. 014021

The search fur 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 (MC) event generators are heavily utilized to extract and interpret the Higgs signal, which depends on the details of the soft-gluon emission from the initial state partons in hadronic collisions. Thus, it is crucial to establish the reliability of the MC event generators 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 fur 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.