Doubly-polarized WZ hadronic production at NLO QCD+EW: calculation method and further results

Abstract

The doubly-polarized production of W^pm Z pairs at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is presented at next-to-leading order (NLO) accuracy both for the electroweak (EW) and QCD corrections, including a detailed description of the calculational method using the double-pole approximation. Numerical results at the 13 TeV LHC are presented in particular for the W^- Z case in the e^-bar{nu }_e mu ^+mu ^- channel using ATLAS fiducial cuts and for polarized distributions defined in the WZ center-of-mass system. The NLO EW corrections relative to the NLO QCD predictions are found to be smaller than 5% in most kinematic distributions, but can reach the level of 10% in some distributions such as lepton transverse momentum distributions or rapidity separation between the electron and the Z boson. EW corrections are not uniform for different polarizations. A comparison between the new ATLAS measurement of polarization fractions to our theoretical prediction is presented.