Precise predictions for (non-standard) W+photon+jet production

TL;DR

This paper provides a detailed NLO QCD analysis of Wγ+jet production at colliders, including off-shell effects and anomalous couplings, revealing significant corrections and sensitivity to new physics at high energies.

Contribution

It presents the first comprehensive NLO QCD calculation of Wγ+jet production including off-shell effects and anomalous couplings at the Tevatron and LHC.

Findings

NLO corrections are sizable and phase space dependent.

Differential distributions show increased sensitivity to anomalous couplings.

Results suggest potential for probing new physics beyond current bounds.

Abstract

We report on a detailed investigation of the next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to $W\gamma$+jet production at the Tevatron and the LHC using a fully-flexible parton-level Monte Carlo program. We include the full leptonic decay of the $W$, taking into account all off-shell and finite width effects, as well as non-standard $WW\gamma$ couplings. We find particularly sizable corrections for the currently allowed parameter range of anomalous couplings imposed by LEP data. In total the NLO differential distributions reveal a substantial phase space dependence of the corrections, leaving considerable sensitivity to anomalous couplings beyond scale uncertainty at large momentum transfers in the anomalous vertex.