$W^{\pm}Z$ production at hadron colliders in NNLO QCD

F. Cascioli; T. Gehrmann; M. Grazzini; S. Kallweit; P. Maierhofer; A. Manteuffel; S. Pozzorini; D. Rathlev; L. Tancredi; E. Weihs

Paper

$W^{\pm}Z$ production at hadron colliders in NNLO QCD

Abstract

We report on the first computation of the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD corrections to

production in proton collisions. We consider both the inclusive production of on-shell

pairs at LHC energies and the total

rates including off-shell effects of the

and

bosons. In the off-shell computation, the invariant mass of the lepton pairs from the

boson decay is required to be in a given mass window, and the results are compared with the corresponding measurements obtained by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations. The NNLO corrections range from 8% at

=7 TeV to 11% at

=14 TeV and significantly improve the agreement with the LHC data at

=7 and 8 TeV.