W\gamma \gamma production with leptonic decays at NLO QCD

TL;DR

This paper presents the calculation of next-to-leading order QCD corrections to W gamma gamma production with leptonic W decays at hadron colliders, showing significant modifications to leading-order predictions.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed NLO QCD correction calculations for W gamma gamma production including leptonic W decays at the LHC and Tevatron.

Findings

NLO corrections significantly alter cross section predictions.

Shape and magnitude of observables are strongly affected by NLO effects.

Results are implemented in a flexible Monte Carlo framework.

Abstract

The computation of the NLO-QCD corrections to the cross sections for W \gamma \gamma production in hadronic collisions is presented. We consider the case of real photons in the final state, but include full leptonic decays of the W. Numerical results for the LHC and the Tevatron are obtained through a parton level Monte Carlo based on the structure of the VBFNLO program, allowing an easy implementation of general cuts and distributions. We show the dependence on scale variations of the integrated cross sections and provide evidence of the fact that NLO QCD corrections strongly modify the LO predictions for observables at the LHC both in magnitude and in shape.