Wgamma and Zgamma production at the LHC in NNLO QCD

M. Grazzini; S. Kallweit; D. Rathlev

Paper

Wgamma and Zgamma production at the LHC in NNLO QCD

Abstract

We consider the production of

and

pairs at hadron colliders. We report on the complete fully differential computation of radiative corrections at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD perturbation theory. The calculation includes the leptonic decay of the vector boson with the corresponding spin correlations, off shell effects and final-state photon radiation. We present numerical results for

collisions at 7 and 8 TeV and we compare them with available LHC data. In the case of

production, the impact of NNLO corrections is generally moderate, ranging from 8% to 18%, depending on the applied cuts. In the case of

production, the NNLO effects are more important, and range from 19% to 26%, thereby improving the agreement of the theoretical predictions with the data. As expected, the impact of QCD radiative corrections is significantly reduced when a jet veto is applied.