QCD corrections to $W^+W^-$ production through gluon fusion

By F. Caola, K. Melnikov, R. Rontsch, L. Tancredi. 2015

174 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We compute the next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to the gg→W+W−→l1+ν1l2−ν¯2 process, mediated by a massless quark loop, at the LHC. This process first contributes to the hadroproduction of W+W− at O(αs2), but, nevertheless, has a sizable impact on the total production rate. We find that the NLO QCD corrections to the gg→W+W− process amount to O(50)%, and increase the NNLO QCD cross sections of pp→W+W− by approximately two percent, at both the 8 TeV and 13 TeV LHC. We also compute the NLO corrections to gluonic W+W− production within a fiducial volume used by the ATLAS Collaboration in their 8 TeV measurement of the W+W− production rate and find that the QCD corrections are significantly smaller than in the inclusive case. While the current experimental uncertainties are still too large to make these differences relevant, the observed strong dependence of perturbative corrections on kinematic cuts underscores that extrapolation from a fiducial measurement to the total cross section is an extremely delicate matter, and calls for the direct comparison of fiducial volume measurements with corresponding theoretical computations.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5f1bceff583450110c9d61bb2759f7dc3111483d

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

W+W− production at the LHC: fiducial cross sections and distributions in NNLO QCD (2015, methodology): “That conclusion is supported by the recent calculation of the NLO corrections to the loop-induced gg channel [37].”
Les Houches 2017: Physics at TeV Colliders Standard Model Working Group Report (2017, background): “Leading N(3)LOQCD corrections, namely the NLOQCDcorrections to the loop-induced gg channels, became available for the neutral final states ZZ [307] and WW [308] involving full off-shell leptonic dacays, based on the two-loop amplitudes of Refs.”
Fully differential NNLO computations with MATRIX (2017, methodology): “should provide a reasonable estimate of the uncertainties due to yet un-calculated higher-order QCD contributions. The purely gluon-induced NLO corrections to the ggchannel have been computed in Ref. [115]. With W Zproduction [38,39], the last diboson process has recently been computed at NNLO accur”
Higgs Physics at the HL-LHC and HE-LHC (2019, background): “NLO corrections are known below the top threshold, and only in an approximate form above [494, 495, 496, 497, 498, 499, 500].”