Higgs Production: A Comparison of Parton Showers and Resummation

The search for the Higgs boson(s) is one of the major priorities at the upgraded Fermilab Tevatron and at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Since Monte Carlo event generators are heavily utilized to understand and extract any possible Higgs signal, it is crucial to establish the reliability of their predictions. An understanding of the Higgs signature depends upon the understanding of the details of the soft-gluon emission from the initial state partons. In this paper, the parton shower formalism for Monte Carlos is compared to that of an analytic resummation calculation. Predictions and, where they exist, data for the transverse momentum distribution of Higgs bosons, Z0 bosons, and photon pairs are compared for the Tevatron and the LHC. This comparison is useful in understanding the strengths and the weaknesses of the different theoretical approaches, and in testing their reliability.