NLO QCD corrections for W^+W^- pair production in association with two jets at hadron colliders

TL;DR

This paper calculates the next-to-leading order QCD corrections for W-boson pair production with two jets at colliders, crucial for understanding backgrounds in Higgs searches, with results varying across energies.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed NLO QCD correction calculations for W^+W^- plus two jets production at hadron colliders, including full spin correlations.

Findings

NLO corrections are moderate but energy-dependent.

Corrections vary significantly between Tevatron and LHC energies.

Results improve background modeling for Higgs boson searches.

Abstract

We compute the NLO QCD corrections to the pair production of W-bosons in association with two jets at the Tevatron and the LHC. This process is an important background to heavy Higgs-boson production in association with two jets, either in gluon or weak boson fusion. We consider leptonic decays of W-bosons and include all the spin correlations exactly. For natural choices of the renormalization scale, the NLO QCD corrections to pp(ppbar) -> W^+W^-jj are moderate but different for various values of the center-of-mass collision energy at the LHC and the Tevatron, emphasizing the need to compute them explicitly.