0 negative weights for tWZ LO

Asked by Carlos Vico Villalba

Dear experts,

We are working on the implementation of tWZ that only has the particularity that the Z decays hadronically, the process card
is the following:

import model sm-no_b_mass
define p = p b b~
define j = j b b~
define l+ = e+ mu+ ta+
define l- = e- mu- ta-
define vl = ve vm vt
define vl~ = ve~ vm~ vt~
generate p p > t w- z $$ w+ w- /h @0
add process p p > t~ w+ z $$ w+ w- /h @1
output st_tWZ-Zto2Q_5f_LO

The decay is handled in madspin as follows:
define q = u d s c b
define q~ = u~ d~ s~ c~ b~
decay t > w+ b, w+ > all all
decay t~ > w- b~, w- > all all
decay w+ > all all
decay w- > all all
decay z > q q~
# running the actual code
launch

And the PDF that we are using is NNPDF31_nnlo_as_0118_mc_hessian_pdfas (lhaid: 325300). So, as far as I understand, in setups in which LO calculations are mixed with NNLO PDFs, one can obtain negative weights even at LO. However, after producing some modest amount of events (~2k events) in this setup (and actually, after showering), the report says that the negative weight fraction is exactly 0, which sounds very strange to me.

So my question is: should we worry that there are 0 negative weights in this process? Or is this something that might happen in some corner cases in which the point that I make above does not apply?

Feel free to correct me in anything I may have misunderstood on how this works, and thank you very much in advance!

Best regards,
Carlos Vico

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MadGraph5_aMC@NLO Edit question
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Solved by:
Olivier Mattelaer
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Best Olivier Mattelaer (olivier-mattelaer) said :
#1

Hi,

If you look at the info file for that pdf you will see the following description:
SetDesc: "NNPDF3.1 NNLO global fit, alphas(MZ)=0.118. mem=0 => average on replicas (setting negative replicas to zero); mem=1-100 => PDF eig.; mem=101 => central value (forced positive definite) Alphas(MZ)=0.116; mem=102 => central value (forced positive definite) Alphas(MZ)=0.120"

So clearly, the authors have excluded from their PDF any possibility to be negative for the central value (as well as for the the two other set for different value of alphas). But you can see that if you use any of the replica used for the error. Those could be negative (at least this is my understanding of their description).

So given such description, indeed you do not expect any weight to be negative (but the additional ones related to the pdf variation)

This being said, I do not know what is the expected rated of negative events that you do expect for a pdf set that does not force them to be positive, such rate does obviously depend on both the pdf set and on the physics that you are looking for. So even if your pdf was not positive definite, it is not impossible that some samples (even larger than 2k) do no have negative weight.

Cheers,

Olivier

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Carlos Vico Villalba (cvico) said :
#2

Thank you very much for the very fast and very detailed answer Olivier!

This indeed solve our doubts.

Cheers,
Carlos

Revision history for this message
Carlos Vico Villalba (cvico) said :
#3

Thanks Olivier Mattelaer, that solved my question.