Production of electroweak bosons at hadron colliders: theoretical aspects

TL;DR

The paper surveys the theoretical description of electroweak boson production at hadron colliders, covering inclusive production, differential distributions (rapidity and transverse momentum), multi-boson processes, and associated production with jets and heavy flavors. It highlights NNLO QCD and NLO EW corrections, resummation techniques, and the role of photon-initiated channels in refining SM predictions. It discusses how precision measurements of W/Z properties and asymmetries constrain PDFs and electroweak parameters, and how vector bosons serve as backgrounds and probes for top/Higgs physics and BSM searches. The discussion underscores the ongoing advances enabling percent-level accuracy and the continued importance of vector-boson production in high-energy phenomenology.

Abstract

Since the W and Z discovery, hadron colliders have provided a fertile ground, in which continuously improving measurements and theoretical predictions allow to precisely determine the gauge boson properties, and to probe the dynamics of electroweak and strong interactions. This article will review, from a theoretical perspective, the role played by the study, at hadron colliders, of electroweak boson production properties, from the better understanding of the proton structure, to the discovery and studies of the top quark and of the Higgs, to the searches for new phenomena beyond the Standard Model.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: $W$ and $Z$ boson cross sections in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{S}=7$ TeV: ATLASAad:2011dm and CMSCMS:2011aa data, compared to NNLO predictions for various PDF setsForte:2013wc.
• Figure 2: Production Aaltonen:2009ta (left) and leptonic D0:2014kma (right) charge asymmetries of $W$ bosons in $p\bar{p}$ collisions at the Tevatron, $\sqrt{S}=1.96$ TeV.
• Figure 3: Left: leptonic charge asymmetries in $W$ production at the LHC ($\sqrt{S}=7$ TeV), extracted from the measurements of the ATLASAad:2011yna, CMSChatrchyan:2013mza and LHCbAaij:2014wba experiments. Right: $Z$ boson rapidity spectrum from CMSCMS:2014jea, compared with NNLO predictionsLi:2012wna.
• Figure 4: Fraction of the $Z$ bosons of transverse momentum $p_T(Z)$ produced by the quark-gluon initial state, at the Tevatron and LHC.
• Figure 5: $Z$ boson $p_T$ spectrum measured by ATLASAad:2014xaa (upper left), compared to various theoretical predictions: fixed-order NNLO (with different scales and with/without NLO EW corrections, upper right), resummed (N)NLO+(N)NLL (left Balazs:1997xdGuzzi:2013aja and rightBanfi:2012du lower plots).