Threshold resummation for $W$-boson pair production at NNLO+NNLL

TL;DR

This paper performs threshold resummation at NNLO+NNLL accuracy for on-shell W-boson pair production at the LHC, improving cross-section predictions and reducing theoretical uncertainties.

Contribution

It introduces a method for threshold resummation of W-boson pair production at NNLO+NNLL, enhancing accuracy of theoretical predictions at high invariant masses.

Findings

NNLL resummation increases NNLO cross-sections by about 6.3% at Q=2500 GeV.

Resummation reduces scale uncertainties from 6.8% to 4.1%.

Uncertainties from parton distribution functions are around 3% at high Q.

Abstract

We present results for threshold resummation of the invariant mass distribution, for on-shell production of a pair of $W$-bosons at next-to-next-to-leading order + next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic (NNLO+NNLL) accuracy in QCD. Owing to its sensitivity to the self-interactions between gauge bosons, this process is important to investigate at the energies of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We achieve this resummation by exploiting the factorization properties of the soft and virtual parts of the partonic cross-section. Our analysis has been carried out for the invariant mass distribution up to $Q$ = 2500 GeV. At this highest $Q$ we find that, for 13.6 TeV LHC, the NNLL resummation enhances the NNLO cross-sections by about $6.3\%$ and reduces the conventional scale uncertainties from 6.8\% at NNLO to 4.1\% at NNLO+NNLL. We also estimate the intrinsic uncertainties due to the non-perturbative parton distribution functions at the highest perturbative order, for both fixed-order and resummed results, to be around 3\% for $Q \sim$ 2000 GeV.