On the simulated kinematic distributions of heavy meson decays

Abstract

Modern measurements in flavour physics rely on accurate simulations of signal and background processes, provided by a wide range of general-purpose and specialised Monte-Carlo event generators. Due to the inclusion of a larger amount of specialised decays of heavy hadrons, EvtGen is often the tool of choice for many scenarios. We investigate the phase-space sampling algorithm of EvtGen and demonstrate that it generates unphysical features in kinematic distributions of semileptonic $B$ decays involving resonances, originating from neglected phase-space factors. We provide a short-term solution to correct the affected simulated samples through reweighting of the hadronic invariant mass distribution.

Comments: v4: 17 pages, 9 (not so) amazing figures, added appendix on EvtGen code