NNLO QCD study of polarised $W^{+}{W}^{-}$ production at the LHC

Abstract

Longitudinal polarisation of the weak bosons is a direct consequence of Electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism providing an insight into its nature, and is instrumental in searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. We perform a polarisation study of the diboson production in the $pp\to e^{+}{\nu }_e{\mu }^{-}{\bar{\nu }}_{\mu }$ process at NNLO QCD in the fiducial setup inspired by experimental measurements at ATLAS. This is the first polarisation study at NNLO. We employ the double-pole approximation framework for the polarised calculation, and investigate NNLO effects arising in differential distributions.

Comments: corrected typos, added a reference, amended and clarified discussion with comments on top-quark loop effects, etc; matches JHEP published version