Massive gauge boson pair production at the LHC: a next-to-leading order story

TL;DR

This paper provides comprehensive next-to-leading order predictions for gauge boson pair production at the LHC, including QCD and electroweak corrections, and compares these with current experimental data.

Contribution

It offers the first detailed analysis of the hierarchy between QCD and electroweak contributions, with analytical leading-logarithmic explanations and uncertainty assessments.

Findings

QCD gluon-induced processes dominate over photon-induced channels.

Theoretical uncertainties are quantified from scale, PDF, and alpha_s variations.

Predictions are consistent with current LHC measurements.

Abstract

Electroweak gauge boson pair production is one of the most important Standard Model processes at the LHC, not only because it is a benchmark process but also by its ability to probe the electroweak interaction directly. We present full next-to-leading order predictions for the production cross sections and distributions of on-shell massive gauge boson pair production in the Standard Model. This includes the QCD and electroweak (EW) corrections. We study the hierarchy between the different channels when looking at the size of the QCD gluon-induced processes and the EW photon-induced processes and provide the first comprehensive explanation of this hierarchy thanks to analytical leading-logarithmic results. We also provide a detailed study of the theoretical uncertainties affecting the total cross section predictions that stem from scale variation, parton distribution function and $\alpha_s$ errors. We then compare with the present LHC data.