$W^+W^-$ + 3 Jet Production at the Large Hadron Collider in NLO QCD

TL;DR

This paper provides the first NLO QCD predictions for $W^+W^-$ production with up to three jets at the LHC, crucial for background estimation and new physics constraints.

Contribution

It introduces the first NLO QCD calculations for electroweak di-vector boson production with three jets at a hadron collider.

Findings

Total and differential cross sections at 8 and 13 TeV LHC energies.

Implementation of on-shell and unitarity methods in BlackHat and SHERPA.

Event files available for future analyses.

Abstract

We present next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD predictions to $W^+W^-$ production in association with up to three jets at hadron colliders. We include contributions from couplings of the $W$ bosons to light quarks as well as trilinear vector couplings. These processes are used in vector-boson coupling measurements, are background to Higgs signals and are needed to constrain many new physics scenarios. For the first time NLO QCD predictions are shown for electroweak di-vector boson production with three jets at a hadron collider. We show total and differential cross sections for the LHC with proton center-of-mass energies of 8 and 13 TeV. To perform the calculation we employ on-shell and unitarity methods implemented in the BlackHat library along with the SHERPA package. We have produced event files that can be accessed for future dedicated studies.