Soft-drop grooming for hadronic event shapes

Abstract: Soft-drop grooming of hadron-collision final states has the potential to significantly reduce the impact of non-perturbative corrections, and in particular the underlying-event contribution. This eventually will enable a more direct comparison of accurate perturbative predictions with experimental measurements. In this study we consider soft-drop groomed dijet event shapes. We derive general results needed to perform the resummation of suitable event-shape variables to next-to-leading logarithmic (NLL) accuracy matched to exact next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD matrix elements. We compile predictions for the transverse-thrust shape accurate to NLO+NLL' using the implementation of the CAESAR formalism in the Sherpa event generator framework. We complement this by state-of-the-art parton- and hadron-level predictions based on NLO QCD matrix elements matched with parton showers. We explore the potential to mitigate non-perturbative corrections for particle-level and track-based measurements of transverse thrust by considering a wide range of soft-drop parameters. We find that soft-drop grooming indeed is very efficient in removing the underlying event. This motivates future experimental measurements to be compared to precise QCD predictions and employed to constrain non-perturbative models in Monte-Carlo simulations.