W boson production at hadron colliders: the lepton charge asymmetry in NNLO QCD

TL;DR

This paper computes the lepton charge asymmetry from W boson production at hadron colliders up to NNLO QCD, including experimental cuts, and compares theoretical predictions with collider data.

Contribution

It provides the first NNLO QCD calculation of the lepton charge asymmetry in W production, incorporating realistic experimental conditions.

Findings

NNLO corrections significantly affect the asymmetry predictions.

Theoretical results show good agreement with Tevatron data.

Predictions for LHC energies are presented for future comparisons.

Abstract

We consider the production of W bosons in hadron collisions, and the subsequent leptonic decay W->lnu_l. We study the asymmetry between the rapidity distributions of the charged leptons, and we present its computation up to the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD perturbation theory. Our calculation includes the dependence on the lepton kinematical cuts that are necessarily applied to select W-> lnu_l events in actual experimental analyses at hadron colliders. We illustrate the main differences between the W and lepton charge asymmetry, and we discuss their physical origin and the effect of the QCD radiative corrections. We show detailed numerical results on the charge asymmetry in ppbar collisions at the Tevatron, and we discuss the comparison with some of the available data. Some illustrative results on the lepton charge asymmetry in pp collisions at LHC energies are presented.