English

Gluon fusion contribution to W+W- + jet production

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2015-06-05 v1

Abstract

We describe the computation of the ggW+Wggg \to W^+W^-g process that contributes to the production of two WW-bosons and a jet at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). While formally of next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD, this process can be evaluated separately from the bulk of NNLO QCD corrections because it is finite and gauge-invariant. It is also enhanced by the large gluon flux and by selection cuts employed in the Higgs boson searches in the decay channel HW+W H \to W^+W^-, as was first pointed out by Binoth {\it et al.} in the context of ggW+Wgg \to W^+W^- production. For cuts employed by the ATLAS collaboration, we find that the gluon fusion contribution to ppW+Wjpp \to W^+W^-j enhances the background by about ten percent and can lead to moderate distortions of kinematic distributions which are instrumental for the ongoing Higgs boson searches at the LHC. We also release a public code to compute the NLO QCD corrections to this process, in the form of an add-on to the package {\tt MCFM}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1205.6987,
  title  = {Gluon fusion contribution to W+W- + jet production},
  author = {Tom Melia and Kirill Melnikov and Raoul Rontsch and Markus Schulze and Giulia Zanderighi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1205.6987},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

13 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables