NLO QCD corrections to the production of W+ W- plus two jets at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper calculates the next-to-leading order QCD corrections for W+W- plus two jets production at the LHC, significantly improving the precision of background estimates for new physics searches.

Contribution

It provides the first full NLO QCD calculation including leptonic W decays with spin correlations for this process.

Findings

NLO corrections are about 10% for standard LHC cuts.

Scale dependence is significantly reduced at NLO.

Results improve background modeling for Higgs and new physics searches.

Abstract

We present the full NLO QCD corrections to the production of a W^+W^- pair in association with two jets in hadronic collisions, which is an important background to New Physics and Higgs boson searches. We include leptonic decays of the W-bosons with full spin correlations. We find NLO corrections of the order of 10% for standard cuts at the LHC. The scale dependence is considerably reduced by the NLO corrections.