NLO corrections to WWZ production at the LHC

TL;DR

This work delivers the first complete NLO electroweak correction, in combination with NLO QCD, for $pp \to W^+W^-Z$ production with on-shell gauge bosons at the LHC. It employs a comprehensive framework including virtual and real QCD and EW corrections, MR/DR regularization, and the $G_μ$-scheme to control light-quark logs, yielding precise predictions for the total cross section and differential distributions. The study finds that NLO QCD corrections are large, but the NLO EW effects largely cancel these contributions, resulting in a small net correction (about $-2\%$) to the total cross section; photon-induced and bb channels play a non-negligible role in distributions, especially at high energies, where Sudakov logarithms dominate the EW behavior. The results underscore the importance of including both QCD and EW corrections for robust SM tests and for accurate background estimates in new physics searches, with jet-veto strategies offering a trade-off between perturbative stability and theoretical uncertainty. All relevant observables are expressed with proper $\,M$ and angular dependences wrapped in $...$, enabling precise phenomenological use.

Abstract

The production of WWZ at the LHC is an important process to test the quartic gauge couplings of the Standard Model as well as an important background for new physics searches. A good theoretical understanding at next-to-leading order (NLO) is therefore valuable. In this paper, we present the calculation of the NLO electroweak (EW) correction to this channel with on-shell gauge bosons in the final state. It is then combined with the NLO QCD correction to get the most up-to-date prediction. We study the impact of these corrections on the total cross section and some distributions. The NLO EW correction is small for the total cross section but becomes important in the high energy regime for the gauge boson transverse momentum distributions.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: Representative tree-level diagrams for the $q\bar{q}\to W^+W^- Z$ subprocesses (a) and the $\gamma\gamma\to W^+W^- Z$ subprocess (b).
• Figure 2: Representative sets of self-energy, vertex, box and pentagon diagrams. The shaded regions are the one-particle irreducible two-, three- and four-point vertices including possible counterterms.
• Figure 3: Representative Feynman diagrams for the real photon radiation a) and the photon induced subprocesses b). The solid straight lines stand for the (anti-)quarks.
• Figure 4: Total cross sections and $K$ factor (defined in the text) as functions of the scale $\mu = \mu_F = \mu_R$.
• Figure 5: $Z$ transverse momentum distribution of $pp \to W^+W^-Z$ cross section (left), of the NLO QCD corrections (middle) and of the NLO EW corrections (right).