Production of W+W- pairs via subleading processes at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates various subleading processes, especially photon-photon interactions, contributing to W+W- pair production at the LHC, highlighting their significance at high transverse momenta and invariant masses.

Contribution

It introduces and quantifies new subleading photon-photon induced processes for W+W- production, expanding beyond previously considered dominant mechanisms.

Findings

Photon-photon processes account for 1-2% of total W+W- cross section.

At high transverse momenta, photon-photon contributions reach about 10%.

Photon-photon components are comparable to quark-antiquark contributions at large invariant masses.

Abstract

We discuss many new subleading processes for inclusive production of W+W- pairs generally not included in the literature so far. We focus mainly on photon-photon induced processes. We include elastic-elastic, elastic-inelastic, inelastic-elastic and inelastic-inelastic contributions. Predictions for the total cross section and differential distributions in W - boson rapidity and transverse momentum as well as WW invariant mass are presented. The gamma-gamma components only constitute about 1-2 percent of the inclusive W+W- cross section but increases up to about 10 percent at large W+W- transverse momenta, and are even comparable to the dominant quark-(anti)quark component at large M_{WW}, they are much larger than the gg \to W+W- one.