Hadron Collider Production of Massive Color-Octet Vector Bosons at Next-to-Leading Order

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive NLO QCD analysis of massive color-octet vector boson (coloron) production at the LHC and Tevatron, highlighting the dominant production mechanisms and their numerical significance.

Contribution

It extends previous work by calculating the gluon fusion contribution to coloron production using the pinch technique, showing it is negligible compared to quark annihilation.

Findings

Gluon fusion contribution is four orders of magnitude smaller than quark annihilation.

Coloron production via gluon fusion is relevant only for (nearly) fermiophobic colorons.

Extensive numerical results for NLO coloron production at LHC and Tevatron.

Abstract

This paper completes the study of the next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to massive color-octet vector boson production at the LHC and Tevatron. The massive color-octet vector bosons are generically referred to as colorons. Building on our previous calculation of quark-initiated coloron production at NLO, we use the pinch technique to investigate coloron production via gluon fusion. We demonstrate that this one-loop production amplitude is finite, and find that its numerical contribution to coloron production is typically four orders of magnitude smaller than the contribution from quark annihilation. Coloron production via gluon fusion is therefore only relevant if the colorons are (nearly) fermiophobic. We then present extensive plots and tables of our full results for NLO coloron production at the Tevatron and the LHC.