Diphoton production in vector-boson scattering at the LHC at next-to-leading order QCD

Francisco Campanario,Le Duc Ninh,Matthias Kerner,Ivan Rosario

doi:10.1007/jhep06(2020)072

Abstract

In this paper, we present results at next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD for photon pair production in association with two jets via vector boson scattering within the Standard Model (SM), and also in an effective field theory framework with anomalous gauge coupling effects via bosonic dimension-6 and 8 operators. We observe that, com- pared to other processes in the class of two electroweak (EW) vector boson production in association with two jets, more exclusive cuts are needed in order to suppress the SM QCD-induced background channel. As expected, the NLO QCD corrections reduce the scale uncertainties considerably. Using a well-motivated dynamical scale choice, we find moderate K -factors for the EW-induced process while the QCD-induced channel receives much larger corrections. Furthermore, we observe that applying a cut of Delta {phi}_{j2gamma 1}^{mathrm{cut}}<2.5 for the second hardest jet and the hardest photon helps to increase the signal significance and reduces the impact of higher-order QCD corrections.

Highlights

JHEP06(2020)072 are very small compared to the scale uncertainties of the QCD background when VBS cuts are applied
In this paper, we present results at next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD for photon pair production in association with two jets via vector boson scattering within the Standard Model (SM), and in an effective field theory framework with anomalous gauge coupling effects via bosonic dimension-6 and 8 operators
We would like to mention that NLO QCD corrections to the massive EW channels have been known for a decade in the VBS approximation [7,8,9,10,11], and have been recently more precisely calculated beyond the VBS approximation with full off-shell and interference effects taken into account in ref. [12] for the same-sign W W jj process and in ref. [14] for the W Zjj channel

Summary

Introduction

JHEP06(2020)072 are very small compared to the scale uncertainties of the QCD background when VBS cuts are applied. NLO EW corrections have been calculated for the same-sign W W jj process [12, 29, 30] (including EW, QCD and all interference) and EW W Zjj channel [14]. EW di-photon production in association with two jets, γγjj, is the only process for which the NLO QCD predictions have not been studied and measurements are not available.

Results

Conclusion