Next-to-leading order electroweak corrections to off-shell WWW production at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper calculates next-to-leading order electroweak corrections to off-shell WWW production at the LHC, revealing phase space-dependent effects that are crucial for precise measurements of gauge boson couplings.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive NLO electroweak correction calculation for fully off-shell WWW production including all relevant topologies and interferences.

Findings

Large cancellations in electroweak corrections for the qar{q}-induced channel

Corrections amount to about -2.0% in a fiducial region

Corrections vary significantly with phase space and observables

Abstract

Triboson processes allow for a measurement of the triple and quartic couplings of the Standard Model gauge bosons, which can be used to constrain anomalous gauge couplings. In this paper we calculate the next-to-leading order electroweak corrections to fully off-shell $W^-W^+W^+$ production, namely the production of a $\ell_1^-\ell_2^+\ell_3^+\bar{\nu}_{\ell_1}\nu_{\ell_2}\nu_{\ell_3}$ final state with ($\ell_i=e,\mu$), including all triple, double, single and non resonant topologies and interferences of diagrams with all different vector boson ($W,Z,\gamma$) intermediate states. We find large cancellations of the electroweak correction to the $q\bar{q}$-induced channel, which includes the exchange of virtual electroweak gauge bosons, and photon-induced jet radiation processes. This accidental compensation is found to be strongly phase space and observable dependent. The resulting corrections in a suitably defined fiducial region thus amount to $-2.0\%$, but rise rapidly for other observables.