NLO electroweak corrections to doubly-polarized $W^+W^-$ production at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper calculates next-to-leading order electroweak corrections to doubly-polarized W+W- production at the LHC, revealing significant effects at high transverse momenta, especially in the doubly-transverse mode.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed NLO electroweak correction analysis for doubly-polarized W+W- production including leptonic final states and various induced processes.

Findings

NLO EW corrections are small for angular distributions.

Corrections reach up to -40% at high transverse momentum.

Largest corrections occur in the doubly-transverse polarization mode.

Abstract

We present new results of next-to-leading order (NLO) electroweak corrections to doubly-polarized cross sections of $W^+W^-$ production at the LHC. The calculation is performed for the leptonic final state of $e^+\mu_e \mu^- \bar{\nu}_\mu$ using the double-pole approximation in the diboson center-of-mass frame. NLO QCD corrections and subleading contributions from the $gg$, $b\bar{b}$, $\gamma\gamma$ induced processes are taken into account in the numerical results. We found that NLO EW corrections are small for angular distributions but can reach tens of percent for transverse momentum distributions at high energies, e.g. reaching $-40\%$ at $p_{T,e}\approx 300$ GeV. In these high $p_T$ regions, EW corrections are largest for the doubly-transverse mode.