Beam polarization effects on Z-boson pair production at electron-positron colliders: a full one-loop analysis

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive one-loop level analysis of Z-boson pair production in electron-positron collisions, emphasizing the impact of initial beam polarization on radiative corrections and production rates.

Contribution

It offers the first detailed numerical evaluation of electroweak and QED corrections with beam polarization effects for Z-boson pair production at electron-positron colliders.

Findings

Radiative corrections significantly depend on initial beam polarization.

Polarized beams can improve correction accuracy by a factor of three.

Full electroweak corrections are essential for percent-level precision.

Abstract

We present high-precision predictions for Z boson-pair production via electron-positron collisions by taking into account a full set of one-loop order scattering amplitudes, i.e., electroweak (EW) corrections together with soft and hard QED radiation. We provide a detailed numerical evaluation, from full EW corrections to pure QED corrections, specifically focusing on the effect of initial beam polarization on production rate. The left-right asymmetry and angular distributions are also presented. The radiative corrections are largely affected by initial beam polarizations. We get an improvement as around three times with completely polarized beams of $e^-_L$ and $e^+_R$. We find that the radiative corrections can sizably modify the production rate, typically yielding a total relative correction up to a few tens of a percent. This imply that the full EW corrections are required for $e^- e^+ \to ZZ$ to match with percent level accuracy.