Parton-shower Effects in Vector-Boson-Fusion Processes

Abstract: We investigate the effects of combining next-to-leading order QCD results with parton-shower effects in $W^+W^-jj$ production via vector-boson fusion including leptonic decays. Using the Herwig 7 framework interfaced to VBFNLO 3, we compare the predictions obtained from the angular-ordered and dipole-based parton shower algorithms combined with subtractive, MC@NLO-type, and multiplicative, Powheg-type, matching. A consistent treatment of renormalisation and factorisation scale variations in the hard process and the parton shower allows to assign more reliable theory uncertainty predictions to key distributions like the central rapidity gap.