Dr Lorenzo Tancredi

Abstract:

We report on the calculation of the two-loop QCD helicity amplitudes for the production of pairs of off-shell electroweak vector bosons in the qq¯0 and gg channels. These amplitudes were the last missing ingredient required for the evaluation of the NNLO QCD corrections to vector boson pair production at the LHC.

Abstract:

Charged gauge boson pair production at the Large Hadron Collider allows detailed probes of the fundamental structure of electroweak interactions. We present precise theoretical predictions for on-shell W+ W- production that include, for the first time, QCD effects up to next to next to leading order in perturbation theory. As compared to next to leading order, the inclusive W+ W- cross section is enhanced by 9% at 7 TeV and 12% at 14 TeV. The residual perturbative uncertainty is at the 3% level. The severe contamination of the W+ W- cross section due to top-quark resonances is discussed in detail. Comparing different definitions of top-free W+ W- production in the four and five flavor number schemes, we demonstrate that top-quark resonances can be separated from the inclusive W+ W- cross section without a significant loss of theoretical precision.