No Arabic abstract
The high luminosity that will be accumulated at the LHC will enable precise differential measurements of the hadronic production of a top--antitop-quark pair in association with a $text{W}$ boson. Therefore, an accurate description of this process is needed for realistic final states. In this work we combine for the first time the NLO QCD and electroweak corrections to the full off-shell $text{t}overline{text{t}}{text{W}}^+$ production at the LHC in the three-charged-lepton channel, including all spin correlations, non-resonant effects, and interferences. To this end, we have computed the NLO electroweak radiative corrections to the leading QCD order as well as the NLO QCD corrections to both the QCD and the electroweak leading orders.
We present results of a computation of NLO QCD corrections to the production of an off-shell top--antitop pair in association with an off-shell $text{W}^+$ boson in proton--proton collisions. As the calculation is based on the full matrix elements for the process $text{p}text{p}to {text{e}}^+ u_{text{e}},mu^-bar{ u}_mu,tau^+ u_tau,{text{b}},bar{text{b}}$, all off-shell, spin-correlation, and interference effects are included. The NLO QCD corrections are about $20%$ for the integrated cross-section. Using a dynamical scale, the corrections to most distributions are at the same level, while some distributions show much larger $K$-factors in suppressed regions of phase space. We have performed a second calculation based on a double-pole approximation. While the corresponding results agree with the full calculation within few per cent for integrated cross-sections, the discrepancy can reach $10%$ and more in regions of phase space that are not dominated by top--antitop production. As a consequence, on-shell calculations should only be trusted to this level of accuracy.
The measurement of polarization fractions of massive gauge bosons at the LHC provides an important check of the Standard Model and in particular of the Electroweak Symmetry Breaking mechanism. Owing to the unstable character of $text{W}$ and $text{Z}$ bosons, devising a theoretical definition for polarized signals is not straightforward and always subject to some ambiguity. Focusing on $text{W}$-boson pair production at the LHC in the fully leptonic channel, we propose to compute polarized cross-sections and distributions based on the gauge-invariant doubly-resonant part of the amplitude. We include NLO QCD corrections to the leading quark-induced partonic process and also consider the loop-induced gluon-initiated process contributing to the same final state. We present results for both an inclusive setup and a realistic fiducial region, with special focus on variables that are suited for the discrimination of polarized cross-sections and on quantities that can be measured experimentally.
We compute the NLO QCD corrections to the loop-induced gluon fusion contribution in $W^+W^-$ production at the LHC. We consider the full leptonic process $ppto ell^+ell^{prime, -} u_{ell}{bar u}_{ell^prime}+X$, by including resonant and non-resonant diagrams, spin correlations and off-shell effects. Quark-gluon partonic channels are included for the first time in the calculation, and our results are combined with NNLO predictions to the quark annihilation channel at the fully differential level. The computed corrections, which are formally of ${cal O}(alpha_{mathrm{S}}^3)$, increase the NNLO cross section by only about 2%, but have an impact on the shapes of kinematical distributions, in part due to the jet veto, which is usually applied to reduce the top-quark background. Our results, supplemented with NLO EW effects, provide the most advanced fixed-order predictions available to date for this process, and are compared with differential ATLAS data at $sqrt{s}=$ 13 TeV.
In this work we present a calculation of both t-channel and s-channel single-top production at next-to-leading order in QCD for the Tevatron and for the LHC at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV. All the cross sections and kinematical distributions presented include leading non-factorizable corrections arising from interferences of the production and decay subprocesses, extending previous results beyond the narrow-width approximation. The new off-shell effects are found to be generally small, but can be sizeable close to kinematical end-points and for specific distributions.
We present the first calculation of the full next-to-leading-order electroweak and QCD corrections for vector-boson scattering (VBS) into a pair of Z bosons at the LHC. We consider specifically the process ${rm ppto e^{+}e^{-}mu^{+}mu^{-}jj}+X$ at orders $mathcal{O}(alpha^7)$ and $mathcal{O}(alpha_salpha^6)$ and take all off-shell and interference contributions into account. Owing to the presence of enhanced Sudakov logarithms, the electroweak corrections amount to $-16%$ of the leading-order electroweak fiducial cross section and induce significant shape distortions of differential distributions. The QCD corrections on the other hand are larger ($+24%$) than typical QCD corrections in VBS. This originates from considering the full computation including tri-boson contributions in a rather inclusive phase space. We also provide a leading-order analysis of all contributions to the cross section for ${rm pp to e^{+}e^{-}mu^{+}mu^{-}jj}+X$ in a realistic setup.