Two-loop helicity amplitudes for the production of two off-shell electroweak bosons in quark-antiquark collisions

TL;DR

This paper computes two-loop QCD helicity amplitudes for off-shell electroweak boson pair production in quark-antiquark collisions, enhancing theoretical precision for four-lepton production in hadron colliders.

Contribution

It provides the first complete calculation of two-loop helicity amplitudes for all off-shell electroweak boson pairs, including decays to leptons, which was previously unavailable.

Findings

Calculated amplitudes for all boson pairs including off-shell effects

Enhanced theoretical tools for four-lepton production analysis

Facilitates more precise predictions for collider experiments

Abstract

Knowledge of two-loop QCD amplitudes for processes $q\bar q \to V_1 V_2 \to (l_1\bar l'_1)(l_2 \bar l'_2)$ is important for improving the theoretical description of four-lepton production in hadron collisions. In this paper we compute these helicity amplitudes for all intermediate vector bosons, $V_1 V_2 = \gamma^*\gamma^*, WW, ZZ, WZ, W \gamma^*$, including off-shell effects and decays to leptons.