VBFNLO: A parton level Monte Carlo for processes with electroweak bosons

VBFNLO is a fully flexible parton level Monte Carlo program for the simulation of vector boson fusion, double and triple vector boson production in hadronic collisions at next-to-leading order in the strong Coupling constant. VBFNLO includes Higgs and vector boson decays with full spin correlations and all off-shell effects. In addition, VBFNLO implements CP-even and CP-odd Higgs boson via gluon fusion, associated with two jets, at the leading-order one-loop level with the full top- and bottom-quark mass dependence in a generic two-Higgs-doublet model. A variety of effects arising from beyond the Standard Model physics are implemented for selected processes. This includes anomalous couplings of Higgs and vector bosons and a Warped Higgsless extra dimension model. The program offers the possibility to generate Les Houches Accord event files for all processes available at leading order. Program summary Program title: VBFNLO Catalogue identifier: AEDO_v1_0 Program summary URL: http://cpc.cs.qub.ac.uk/summaries/AEDO_v1_0.html Program obtainable from: CPC Program Library, Queen's University, Belfast, N. Ireland Licensing provisions: GPL version 2 No. of lines in distributed program, including test data, etc.: 339218 No. of bytes in distributed program, including test data, etc.: 2620847 Distribution format: tar.gz Programming language: Fortran, parts in C++ Computer: All Operating system: Linux, should also work on other systems Classification: 11.1, 11.2 External routines: Optionally Les Houches Accord PDF Interface library and the GNU Scientific library Nature of problem: To resolve the large scale dependence inherent in leading order calculations and to quantify the cross section error induced by uncertainties in the determination of parton distribution functions, it is necessary to include NLO corrections. Moreover, whenever stringent cuts are required on decay products and/or identified jets the question arises whether the scale dependence and a k-factor, defined as the ratio of NLO to LO cross section, determined for the inclusive production cross sections are valid for the search region one is interested in. Solution method: The problem is best addressed by implementing the one-loop QCD corrections in a fully flexible NLO parton-level Monte Carlo program, where arbitrary cuts can be specified as well as various scale choices. In addition, any currently available parton distribution function set can be used through the LHAPDF library. Running time: Depending on the process studied. Usually from minutes to hours. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.