Next-to-leading-order electroweak corrections to the production of three charged leptons plus missing energy at the LHC

Abstract

The production of a neutral and a charged vector boson with subsequent decays into three charged leptons and a neutrino is a very important process for precision tests of the Standard Model of elementary particles and in searches for anomalous triple-gauge-boson couplings. In this article, the first computation of next-to-leading-order electroweak corrections to the production of the four-lepton final states ${\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}{e}^{+}{\nu }_e$, ${\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}{e}^{-}{\bar{\nu }}_e$, ${\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}{\mu }^{+}{\nu }_{\mu }$, and ${\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}{\mu }^{-}{\bar{\nu }}_{\mu }$ at the Large Hadron Collider is presented. We use the complete matrix elements at leading and next-to-leading order, including all off-shell effects of intermediate massive vector bosons and virtual photons. The relative electroweak corrections to the fiducial cross sections from quark-induced partonic processes vary between $-3\%$ and $-6\%$, depending significantly on the event selection. At the level of differential distributions, we observe large negative corrections of up to $-30\%$ in the high-energy tails of distributions originating from electroweak Sudakov logarithms. Photon-induced contributions at next-to-leading order raise the leading-order fiducial cross section by $+2\%$. Interference effects in final states with equal-flavour leptons are at the permille level for the fiducial cross section, but can lead to sizeable effects in off-shell sensitive phase-space regions.

20 pages, 18 figures

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• NNLO QCD+NLO EW with MATRIX+OpenLoops: precise predictions for vector-boson pair production
• NLO QCD+NLO EW corrections to diboson production matched to parton shower