O(α_s) corrections to the decays of polarized W^+- and Z bosons into massive quark pairs

Abstract

We present O(α_s) results on the decays of polarized W^+- and Z bosons into massive quark pairs. The NLO QCD corrections to the polarized decay functions are given up to the second order in the quark mass expansion. We find a surprisingly strong dependence of the NLO polarized decay functions on finite quark mass effects even at the relatively large mass scale of the W^+- and Z bosons. As a main application we consider the decay t -> b + W^+ involving the helicity fractions ρ_{mm} of the W^+ boson followed by the polarized decay W^+(\uparrow) -> q_1 qbar_2 for which we determine the O(α_s) polar angle decay distribution. We also discuss NLO polarization effects in the production/decay process e^+e^- -> Z(\uparrow) -> q qbar.

25 pages, 2 figures and 1 table

References in corpus (1)

• A survey of top quark polarization at a polarized linear e^+ e^- collider

Cited by in corpus (4)

• NLO QCD corrections to polarised di-boson production in semi-leptonic final states
• Observation of gauge boson joint-polarisation states in $W^{\pm }Z$ production from $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV with the ATLAS detector
• A $W^{\pm }$ polarization analyzer from Deep Neural Networks
• First order electroweak radiative corrections to the decay of the polarised $W$ boson