Recoil Strategy

While the CM momenta of a 2→3 branching are fixed by the generated invariants (and hence by the antenna function), the global orientation of the produced 3-parton system with respect to the rest of the event (or, equivalently, with respect to the original dipole-antenna axis) suffers from an ambiguity outside the LL limits, which can affect the tower of subleading logs generated and can be significant in regions where the leading logs are suppressed or absent.

To illustrate this ambiguity, consider the emissision of a gluon from a qqbar antenna with some finite amount of transverse momentum (meaning transverse to the original dipole-antenna axis, in the CM of the dipole-antenna). The transverse momenta of the qqbar pair after the branching must now add up to an equal, opposite amount, so that total momentum is conserved, i.e., the emission generates a recoil. By an overall rotation of the post-branching 3-parton system, it is possible to align either the q or the qbar with the original axis, such that it becomes the other one that absorbs the entire recoil (the default in showers based on 1→2 branchings such as old-fashioned parton showers and Catani-Seymour showers), or to align both of them slightly off-axis, so that they share the recoil (the default in VINCIA, see illustration below).

Kinematics Map

Note: this setting only applies to massless partons. For massive partons, a generalization of the Kosower map (option 3 below) will be used regardless of the value of VinciaShower:kineMapType. 2->3
			      kinematics

mode  VinciaShower:kineMapType   (default = 3; minimum = 1; maximum = 3)
Selects which method to use for choosing the Euler angle for the global orientation of the post-branching kinematics construction. This setting applies to all massless antennae, irrespective of the branching type.
option 1 : The ARIADNE angle (see illustration). The recoiling mothers share the recoil in proportion to their energy fractions in the CM of the dipole-antenna. Tree-level expansions of the VINCIA shower compared to tree-level matrix elements through third order in alphaS have shown this strategy to give the best overall approximation, followed closely by the KOSOWER map below.
option 2 : LONGITUDINAL. The parton which has the smallest invariant mass together with the radiated parton is taken to be the "radiator". The remaining parton is taken to be the "recoiler". The recoiler remains oriented along the dipole axis in the branching rest frame and recoils longitudinally against the radiator + radiated partons which have equal and opposite transverse momenta (transverse to the original dipole-antenna axis in the dipole-antenna CM). Comparisons to higher-order QCD matrix elements show this to be by far the worst option of the ones so far implemented, hence it could be useful as an extreme case for uncertainty estimates, but should probably not be considered for central tunes. (Note: exploratory attempts at improving the behaviour of this map, e.g., by selecting probabilistically between the radiator and the recoiler according to approximate collinear splitting kernels, only resulted in marginal improvements. Since such variations would introduce additional complications in the VINCIA matching formalism, they have not been retained in the distributed version.)
option 3 : The KOSOWER map. Comparisons to higher-order QCD matrix elements show only very small differences between this and the ARIADNE map above, but since the KOSOWER map is sometimes used in fixed-order contexts, we deem it interesting to include it as a complementary possibility. (Note: the KOSOWER maps in fact represent a whole family of kinematics maps. For experts, the specific choice made here corresponds to using r=sij/(sij+sjk) in the definition of the map.)