Vector-boson pair production at the LHC to O([alpha]^sup 3^) accuracy

Abstract

Abstract

Building on earlier work on electroweak corrections to W-pair production, the first calculation of the full electroweak one-loop corrections to on-shell ZZ, W^sup ±^Z and γγ production at hadron colliders is presented, explicitly taking into account the full vector-boson mass dependence. As a consequence, our results are valid in the whole energy range probed by LHC experiments. Until now, the electroweak corrections have only been known in dedicated high-energy approximations limited to a specific kinematic regime, in particular requiring high boson transverse momenta. Therefore, our results comprise an important and so far missing ingredient to improve on the theory predictions for these fundamental Standard-Model benchmark processes also at intermediate energies and small scattering angles, where actually the bulk of events is located. In case of Z-pair production we have also included the leptonic decays and the associated weak corrections in our analysis. For this particular channel, corrections of about -4% are observed even close to the production threshold. For hard scattering processes with momentum transfers of several hundred GeV one finds large negative corrections which may amount to several tens of percent and lead to significant distortions of transverse-momentum and rapidity distributions.