NLO production of W' bosons at hadron colliders using the MC@NLO and POWHEG methods

Abstract

We present a next-to-leading order (NLO) treatment of the production of a new charged heavy vector boson, generically called W', at hadron colliders via the Drell-Yan process. We fully consider the interference effects with the Standard Model W boson and allow for arbitrary chiral couplings to quarks and leptons. We present results at both leading order (LO) and NLO in QCD using the MC@NLO/Herwig++ and POWHEG methods. We derive theoretical observation curves on the mass-width plane for both the LO and NLO cases at different collider luminosities. The event generator used, Wpnlo, is fully customisable and publicly available.

Comments: 26 pages. Published in JHEP. Includes more complete description of the NLO calculation and matching to the parton shower. Also includes full NLO mass-width reach study, more detailed discussion of NLO/LO differences and wider range of observables