WZ production beyond NLO for high-pT observables

TL;DR

This paper combines NLO QCD calculations for WZ and WZ+jet production using LoopSim and VBFNLO, revealing significant NNLO corrections that improve theoretical predictions for high-pT observables.

Contribution

It introduces a merged NLO-accurate sample for WZ and WZ+jet production that approximates NNLO corrections, enhancing precision in high-energy collider analyses.

Findings

NNLO corrections are 30-100% for key observables.

Including these corrections reduces scale uncertainties by up to 50%.

The method accounts for off-shell and finite-width effects.

Abstract

We use the LoopSim and VBFNLO packages to investigate a merged sample of partonic events that is accurate at NLO in QCD simultaneously for the WZ and WZ+jet production processes. In certain regions of phase space such a procedure is expected to account for the dominant part of the NNLO QCD corrections to the WZ production process. For a number of commonly used experimental observables, we find that these corrections are substantial, in the 30-100% range, and in some cases their inclusion can reduce scale uncertainties by a factor of two. As in the underlying VBFNLO calculations, we include the leptonic decays of the vector bosons and all off-shell and finite-width effects.