NLO corrections to e+e- to WWZ and e+e- to ZZZ

TL;DR

This paper computes one-loop electroweak corrections to e+e- to WWZ and ZZZ processes, revealing significant effects on cross sections and distributions crucial for probing gauge boson couplings and symmetry breaking.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed calculation of electroweak corrections for these processes, including analysis of computational methods and impact on experimental measurements.

Findings

Electroweak corrections remain large at high energies.

Different methods for loop integral stability are compared.

Dipole subtraction and phase-space slicing are evaluated for real corrections.

Abstract

We calculate the one-loop electroweak corrections to e+e- to WWZ and e+e- to ZZZ and analyse their impacts on both the total cross section and some key distributions. These processes are important for the measurements of the quartic couplings of the massive gauge bosons which can be a window on the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking. We find that even after subtracting the leading QED corrections, the electroweak corrections can still be large especially as the energy increases. We compare and implement different methods of dealing with potential instabilities in the routines pertaining to the loop integrals. For the real corrections we apply a dipole subtraction formalism and compare it to a phase-space slicing method.