QCD corrections to charged triple vector boson production with leptonic decay

TL;DR

This work computes the next-to-leading order QCD corrections to charged triple vector boson production at hadron colliders, specifically pp -> ZZW + X and pp -> WWW + X with leptonic decays, incorporating leptonic spin correlations, off-shell effects, and intermediate Higgs exchange. The authors implement a complete calculation with real-emission and virtual contributions, using Catani–Seymour dipole subtraction and a complex-mass scheme, and embed the results in the VBFNLO Monte Carlo framework. They demonstrate large, phase-space–dependent $K$-factors driven by gluon-initiated processes and show how Higgs-mass and jet-veto choices influence both normalization and shapes of distributions. The study provides a flexible tool for precise SM background predictions and for exploring quartic electroweak couplings in multi-lepton final states at the LHC.

Abstract

We compute the O(alpha_s) QCD corrections to charged triple vector boson production at a hadron collider, i.e. the processes pp -> ZZW + X and pp -> WWW + X. Intermediate Higgs boson exchange effects, spin correlations from leptonic vector boson decays, and off-shell contributions are all taken into account. Results are implemented in a fully flexible Monte Carlo program that allows for an easy customization of kinematical cuts and variation of the factorization and renormalization scales. We analyze the dependence of the differential cross sections under scale variations and present distributions where the QCD corrections strongly modify the leading-order results.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: A selection of Feynman diagrams for tree-level $ZZW$ production.
• Figure 2: Sample of real-emission diagrams for $ZZW$ production.
• Figure 3: The three one-loop topologies appearing in the calculation of the virtual contributions.
• Figure 4: Scale dependence of the LO and NLO cross section for 5 charged lepton final states within the cuts of Eq. (\ref{['eq:cuts']}).Left panel:variation of the renormalization and/or the factorization scale for $ZZW^+ +X$ production.Right panel:same as in the left panel but for $ZZW^- +X$ production.
• Figure 5: Scale dependence of the LO and NLO cross section for 3 charged lepton final states within the cuts of Eq. (\ref{['eq:cuts']}).Left panel:variation of the renormalization and/or the factorization scale for $W^+W^-W^+ +X$ production.Right panel:same as in the left panel but for $W^-W^+W^- +X$ production.