NLO QCD + EW corrections to $ZZZ$ production with subsequent leptonic decays at LHC

TL;DR

This paper calculates combined NLO QCD and electroweak corrections to ZZZ production with leptonic decays at the LHC, showing significant effects on cross sections and distributions crucial for precision physics.

Contribution

It provides the first combined NLO QCD and EW correction analysis for ZZZ production with leptonic decays at multiple collider energies using an improved narrow width approximation.

Findings

Jet emission correction is large at high energies.

Applying a jet pT cut reduces correction dependence on scales.

NLO QCD and EW corrections are both significant, affecting precision calculations.

Abstract

In this paper we present the NLO QCD + NLO EW corrections to the $ZZZ$ production with subsequent $Z$-boson leptonic decays at the LHC by adopting the improved narrow width approximation, which takes into account off-shell contributions and spin correlations. Integrated cross sections at $13$, $14$, $33$ and $100~{\rm TeV}$ hadron colliders and various kinematic distributions are presented. Our numerical results show that the jet emission correction accounts for a large part of the total QCD correction, especially in the high energy region. By applying a proper cut to the jet transverse momentum, e.g., $p_{{\rm \,T,jet}} > p_{{\rm \,T,jet}}^{{\rm \,\,\,cut}}=50~{\rm GeV}$, the jet emission correction can be reduced and the cross section is less dependent on the factorization/renormalization scale. This work reveals that both the NLO QCD and the NLO EW corrections are significant. For example, the NLO QCD, NLO EW and NLO QCD + EW relative corrections in the inclusive event selection scheme at the $13~{\rm TeV}$ LHC can reach $63.2\%$, $-9.6\%$ and $47.5\%$, respectively, which means that neither the NLO QCD nor the NLO EW correction is negligible in precision calculations.