Improvements on dipole shower colour (2011.15087v2)

Abstract: The dipole formalism provides a powerful framework from which parton showers can be constructed. In a paper, we proposed a dipole shower with improved colour accuracy and in this paper we show how it can be further improved. After an explicit check at $\mathcal{O}(\alpha_{\mathrm{s}}^{2})$ we confirm that our original shower performs as it was designed to, i.e. inheriting its handling of angular-ordered radiation from a coherent branching algorithm. We also show how other dipole shower algorithms fail to achieve this. Nevertheless, there is an $\mathcal{O}(\alpha_{\mathrm{s}}^{2})$ topology where it differs at sub-leading $N_{\mathrm{c}}$ from a coherent branching algorithm. This erroneous topology can contribute a leading logarithm to some observables and corresponds to emissions that are ordered in $k_t$ but not angle. We propose a simple, computationally efficient way to correct this and assign colour factors in accordance with the coherence properties of QCD to all orders in $\alpha_{\mathrm{s}}$.