QCD and electroweak corrections to WZ scattering at the LHC

Abstract

We present the first computation of the full next-to-leading-order QCD and electroweak corrections to the WZ scattering process at the LHC. All off-shell, gauge-boson-decay, and interference effects are taken into account for the process $\mathrm{pp}\to {\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}{\mathrm{e}}^{+}{\nu }_{\mathrm{e}}\mathrm{jj}+X$ at the orders $\mathcal{O}\left({\alpha }_{\mathrm{s}}{\alpha }^6\right)$ and $\mathcal{O}\left({\alpha }^7\right)$. The electroweak corrections feature the typical Sudakov behaviour towards high energy and amount to $-16\%$ relative to the electroweak contribution to the integrated cross section. Moreover, the corrections induce significant shape distortions in differential distributions. The next-to-leading-order analysis of the quark- and gluon-induced channels is supplemented by a leading-order study of all possible contributions to the full $4\ell+2\mbox{jets}$ production cross section in a realistic fiducial phase-space volume.

28 pages, 44 pdf figures; added more comments on the size of the EW corrections, improved readability of the figures, added $p_{\mathrm{T}}$ distributions of $\mathrm{W}$ and $\mathrm{Z}$, added comment on $\mathrm{tZj}$ background, version to appear in JHEP

References in corpus (10)

• LHAPDF6: parton density access in the LHC precision era
• How bright is the proton? A precise determination of the photon parton distribution function
• Scalar one-loop 4-point integrals
• The Photon Content of the Proton
• The complex-mass scheme for perturbative calculations with unstable particles
• Polarized QED splittings of massive fermions and dipole subtraction for non-collinear-safe observables
• Next-to-leading order QCD corrections to W+Z and W-Z production via vector-boson fusion
• NLO electroweak corrections to off-shell top-antitop production with leptonic decays at the LHC
• Complete NLO corrections to ${\mathrm{W}}^{+}{\mathrm{W}}^{+}$ scattering and its irreducible background at the LHC
• Higgs production in association with off-shell top-antitop pairs at NLO EW and QCD at the LHC