One-loop electroweak radiative corrections to charged lepton pair production in photon-photon collisions

TL;DR

This paper provides precise calculations of muon and tau pair production in photon-photon collisions, including electroweak and QED corrections, highlighting the importance of full EW corrections for accurate predictions.

Contribution

It presents the complete one-loop electroweak corrections for charged lepton pair production in photon-photon collisions, improving theoretical precision.

Findings

Electroweak corrections increase the cross section by about 10%.

Opposite photon polarization doubles the prediction accuracy.

Full EW corrections are necessary for percent-level precision.

Abstract

We provide high-precision predictions for muon-pair and tau-pair productions in a photon-photon collision by considering a complete set of one-loop-level scattering amplitudes, i.e., electroweak (EW) corrections together with soft and hard QED radiation. Accordingly, we present a detailed numerical discussion with particular emphasis on the pure QED corrections as well as genuinely weak corrections. The effects of angular and initial beam polarisation distributions on production rates are also discussed. An improvement is observed by a factor of two with oppositely polarized photons. Our results indicate that the one-loop EW radiative corrections enhance the Born cross section and the total relative correction is typically about ten percent for both production channels. It appears that the full EW corrections to $\gamma \gamma \to \ell^- \ell^+$ are required to match a percent level accuracy.