Z+jet production at the LHC: Electroweak radiative corrections

The investigation of weak bosons $V$ ($V=\mathrm{W}^{\pm}$, $\mathrm{Z}$) produced with or without associated hard QCD jets will be of great phenomenological interest at the LHC. Owing to the large cross sections and the clean decay signatures of the vector bosons, weak-boson production can be used to monitor and calibrate the luminosity of the collider, to constrain the PDFs, or to calibrate the detector. Moreover, the $Z$+jet(s) final state constitutes an important background to a large variety of signatures of physics beyond the Standard Model. To match the excellent experimental accuracy that is expected at the LHC, we have worked out a theoretical next-to-leading-order analysis of $V$+jet production at hadron colliders. The focus of this talk will be on new results on the full electroweak corrections to $Z(\to l^-l^+)$+jet production at the LHC. All off-shell effects are included in our approach, and the finite lifetime of the $Z$ boson is consistently accounted for using the complex-mass scheme. In the following, we briefly introduce the calculation and discuss selected phenomenological implications of our results.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, talk at the "35th International Conference on High Energy Physics", Paris, France, July 22 -- 28, 201

Electroweak corrections to W-boson pair production at the LHC

Vector-boson pair production ranks among the most important Standard-Model benchmark processes at the LHC, not only in view of on-going Higgs analyses. These processes may also help to gain a deeper understanding of the electroweak interaction in general, and to test the validity of the Standard Model at highest energies. In this work, the first calculation of the full one-loop electroweak corrections to on-shell W-boson pair production at hadron colliders is presented. We discuss the impact of the corrections on the total cross section as well as on relevant differential distributions. We observe that corrections due to photon-induced channels can be amazingly large at energies accessible at the LHC, while radiation of additional massive vector bosons does not influence the results significantly.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figures, 4 tables; some references and comments on \gamma\gamma -> WW added; matches version published in JHE

Report of the Snowmass 2013 energy frontier QCD working group

This is the summary report of the energy frontier QCD working group prepared for Snowmass 2013. We review the status of tools, both theoretical and experimental, for understanding the strong interactions at colliders. We attempt to prioritize important directions that future developments should take. Most of the efforts of the QCD working group concentrate on proton-proton colliders, at 14 TeV as planned for the next run of the LHC, and for 33 and 100 TeV, possible energies of the colliders that will be necessary to carry on the physics program started at 14 TeV. We also examine QCD predictions and measurements at lepton-lepton and lepton-hadron colliders, and in particular their ability to improve our knowledge of strong coupling constant and parton distribution functions.Comment: 62 pages, 31 figures, Snowmass community summer study 201

Polarized QED splittings of massive fermions and dipole subtraction for non-collinear-safe observables

Building on earlier work, the dipole subtraction formalism for photonic corrections is extended to various photon--fermion splittings where the resulting collinear singularities lead to corrections that are enhanced by logarithms of small fermion masses. The difference to the earlier treatment of photon radiation is that now no cancellation of final-state singularities is assumed, i.e. we allow for non-collinear-safe final-state radiation. Moreover, we consider collinear fermion production from incoming photons, forward-scattering of incoming fermions, and collinearly produced fermion-antifermion pairs. For all cases we also provide the corresponding formulas for the phase-space slicing approach, and particle polarization is supported for all relevant situations. A comparison of numerical results obtained with the proposed subtraction procedure and the slicing method is explicitly performed for the sample process e- gamma -> e- mu- mu+.Comment: 44 pages, late

Vector-boson pair production and electroweak corrections in

The detailed study of vector-boson pair production processes at the LHC will lead to a better understanding of electroweak physics. As pointed out before, a consistent inclusion of higher-order electroweak effects in the analysis of corresponding experimental data may be crucial to properly predict the relevant phenomenological features of these important reactions. Those contributions lead to dramatic distortions of invariant-mass and angular distributions at high energies, but may also significantly affect the cross section near threshold, as is the case e.g. for Z-pairs. For this reason, we present an analysis of the next-to-leading-order electroweak corrections to WW, WZ, and ZZ production at the LHC, taking into account mass effects as well as leptonic decays. Hence, our predictions are valid in the whole kinematic reach of the LHC and, moreover, respect the spin correlations of the leptonic decay products at next-to-leading-order accuracy. Starting from these fixed-order results, a simple and straightforward method is motivated to combine the electroweak corrections with state-of-the-art Monte Carlo predictions, focusing on a meaningful combination of higher-order electroweak and QCD effects. To illustrate our approach, the electroweak corrections are implemented in the HERWIG++ generator, and their phenomenological effects within a QCD environment are studied explicitly

Electroweak Corrections to WW-boson Hadroproduction at Finite Transverse Momentum.

We calculate the full one-loop electroweak radiative corrections to the cross section of single W-boson inclusive hadroproduction at finite transverse momentum (p_T). This includes the O(alpha) corrections to W+j production, the O(alpha_s) corrections to W+gamma production, and the tree-level contribution from W+j photoproduction with one direct or resolved photon in the initial state. We present the integrated cross section as a function of a minimum-p_T cut as well as the p_T distribution for the experimental conditions at the Fermilab Tevatron and the CERN LHC and estimate the theoretical uncertainties.Comment: 27 pages, 13 figures; typos corrected, references added, matches version to appear in Nucl. Phys.