$W^{\pm }Z$ 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 $W^{\pm }Z$ production in proton collisions. We consider both the inclusive production of on-shell $W^{\pm }Z$ pairs at LHC energies and the total $W^{\pm }Z$ rates including off-shell effects of the $W$ and $Z$ bosons. In the off-shell computation, the invariant mass of the lepton pairs from the $Z$ 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 $\sqrt{s}$=7 TeV to 11% at $\sqrt{s}$=14 TeV and significantly improve the agreement with the LHC data at $\sqrt{s}$=7 and 8 TeV.

Comments: 10 pages, 2 figures, 4 tables