The QCD/SM working group: Summary report

Among the many physics processes at TeV hadron colliders, we look most eagerly for those that display signs of the Higgs boson or of new physics. We do so however amid an abundance of processes that proceed via Standard Model (SM) and in particular Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) interactions, and that are interesting in their own right. Good knowledge of these processes is required to help us distinguish the new from the known. Their theoretical and experimental study teaches us at the same time more about QCD/SM dynamics, and thereby enables us to further improve such distinctions. This is important because it is becoming increasingly clear that the success of finding and exploring Higgs boson physics or other New Physics at the Tevatron and LHC will depend significantly on precise understanding of QCD/SM effects for many observables. To improve predictions and deepen the study of QCD/SM signals and backgrounds was therefore the ambition for our QCD/SM working group at this Les Houches workshop. Members of the working group made significant progress towards this on a number of fronts. A variety of tools were further developed, from methods to perform higher order perturbative calculations or various types of resummation, to improvements in the modeling of underlying events and parton showers. Furthermore, various precise studies of important specific processes were conducted. A significant part of the activities in Les Houches revolved around Monte Carlo simulation of collision events. A number of contributions in this report reflect the progress made in this area. At present a large number of Monte Carlo programs exist, each written with a different purpose and employing different techniques. Discussions in Les Houches revealed the need for an accessible primer on Monte Carlo programs, featuring a listing of various codes, each with a short description, but also providing a low-level explanation of the underlying methods. This primer has now been compiled and a synopsis of it is included here as the first contribution to this report. This report reflects the hard and creative work by the many contributors which took place in the working group. After the MC guide description, the next contributions report on progress in describing multiple interactions, important for the LHC, and underlying events. An announcement of a Monte Carlo database, under construction, is followed by a number of contributions improving parton shower descriptions. Subsequently, a large number of contributions address resummations in various forms, after which follow studies of QCD effects in pion pair, top quark pair and photon pair plus jet production. After a study of electroweak corrections to hadronic precision observables, the report ends by presenting recent progress in methods to compute finite order corrections at one-loop with many legs, and at two-loop.