Electroweak corrections and Bloch-Nordsieck violations in 2-to-2 processes at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper analyzes next-to-leading order electroweak corrections to 2-to-2 processes at the LHC, focusing on large logarithmic effects and Bloch-Nordsieck violations, with implications for various Standard Model processes.

Contribution

It provides a detailed study of electroweak corrections and Bloch-Nordsieck violations for key LHC processes, highlighting their impact on observable ratios and QCD processes.

Findings

Electroweak corrections induce significant double logarithms at NLO.

Bloch-Nordsieck violations affect the accuracy of electroweak predictions.

The Z/photon ratio remains insensitive to QCD corrections but not to electroweak effects.

Abstract

We consider the effect of next-to-leading order (NLO) electroweak corrections to Standard Model 2-to-2 processes, taking into account the potentially large double logarithms originating from both real and virtual corrections. A study of the leading Sudakov logarithms is presented and Bloch-Nordsieck (BN) violations are discussed for processes at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. In particular, we focus on the processes Z/photon+jet and also the ratio of Z to photon production. This ratio is known to be insensitive to NLO QCD corrections but this is not expected to be the case for the electroweak corrections. We also comment on the effect of electroweak corrections and the presence of BN violation for QCD processes, in particular dijet production, and also for purely electroweak processes such as W + H and W + Z associated production.