Search

Abstract The production of virtual photons is a very sensitive probe of the properties of the quark-gluon plasma. As they are experimentally detected by lepton pairs, they suffer from a large background arising from hadron decays. Light-flavour hadrons dominate at low invariant masses below m ee ~ 0.5 GeV and heavy flavours above. These contributions must therefore also be taken into account in experimental analyses at the LHC. In this paper, we calculate the direct contribution from virtual photons produced in the Drell-Yan process with an additional jet in POWHEG and find that it is significant at low invariant masses. We also simulate the background contributions from c c ¯ $$ c\overline{c} $$ and b b ¯ $$ b\overline{b} $$ production with POWHEG and quantify the theoretical uncertainties due to variations of the perturbative scales and parton distribution functions. We find larger relative and absolute uncertainties for the lighter c quarks than for heavier b quarks.

Off-shell effects in large LHC backgrounds are crucial for precision predictions and, at the same time, challenging to simulate. We present a novel method to transform high-dimensional distributions based on a diffusion neural network and use it to generate a process with off-shell kinematics from the much simpler on-shell one. Applied to a toy example of top pair production at LO we show how our method generates off-shell configurations fast and precisely, while reproducing even challenging on-shell features.