Higher-order soft and virtual corrections in $pp\to \gamma W$ production at the LHC

Abstract

We study higher-order QCD corrections beyond NLO for the associated production of a photon with a $W$ boson ($\gamma W^{+}$ and $\gamma W^{-}$ production) at the Large Hadron Collider. We calculate the NNLO soft-plus-virtual QCD corrections as well as the N${}^3$LO soft-gluon corrections to the total production cross section and the photon transverse-momentum distribution in single-particle-inclusive kinematics. The higher-order corrections provide a significant enhancement to the cross section. This is the first calculation of the complete soft-gluon corrections at N${}^3$LO in single-particle-inclusive kinematics for a Standard Model process.

Comments: 14 pages, 2 figures; v2 is the published version