Vector boson production at hadron colliders: a fully exclusive QCD calculation at NNLO

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive NNLO QCD calculation for W and Z boson production at hadron colliders, including interference, decay, and spin effects, implemented in a flexible Monte Carlo tool.

Contribution

It introduces a fully exclusive NNLO QCD calculation for vector boson production, incorporating interference, decay, and spin correlations, with an adaptable Monte Carlo implementation.

Findings

Numerical results for Tevatron and LHC energies.

The calculation includes gamma-Z interference and finite-width effects.

The Monte Carlo program allows arbitrary kinematic cuts and distribution computations.

Abstract

We consider QCD radiative corrections to the production of W and Z bosons in hadron collisions. We present a fully exclusive calculation up to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD perturbation theory. To perform this NNLO computation, we use a recently proposed version of the subtraction formalism. The calculation includes the gamma-Z interference, finite-width effects, the leptonic decay of the vector bosons and the corresponding spin correlations. Our calculation is implemented in a parton level Monte Carlo program. The program allows the user to apply arbitrary kinematical cuts on the final-state leptons and the associated jet activity, and to compute the corresponding distributions in the form of bin histograms. We show selected numerical results at the Tevatron and the LHC.