Large electroweak corrections to vector-boson scattering at the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

For the first time full next-to-leading-order electroweak corrections to off-shell vector-boson scattering are presented. The computation features the complete matrix elements, including all non-resonant and off-shell contributions, to the electroweak process $\mathrm{pp}\to {\mu }^{+}{\nu }_{\mu }{\mathrm{e}}^{+}{\nu }_{\mathrm{e}}\mathrm{jj}$. It is fully differential, and event selections are applied to the final states such that the predictions can be directly compared to experimental measurements. The corrections are surprisingly large, reaching -16% for the fiducial cross section and up to -40% in the tails of distributions. These large corrections are due to enhanced logarithms in the bosonic virtual corrections.

Comments: 5 pages, 4 figures. Version to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett