Abstract
Triple-W-boson production in proton-proton collisions allows for a direct access to the triple and quartic gauge couplings and provides a window to the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking. It is an important process to test the Standard Model (SM) and might be background to physics beyond the SM. We present a calculation of the next-to-leading order (NLO) electroweak corrections to the production of WWW final states at proton-proton colliders with on-shell W bosons and combine the electroweak with the NLO QCD corrections. We study the impact of the corrections to the integrated cross sections and to kinematic distributions of the W bosons. The electroweak corrections are generically of the size of 5-10% for integrated cross sections and become more pronounced in specific phase-space regions. The real corrections induced by quark-photon scattering turn out to be as important as electroweak loops and photon bremsstrahlung corrections, but can be reduced by phase-space cuts. Considering that prior determinations of the photon parton distribution function (PDF) involve rather large uncertainties, we compare the results obtained with different photon PDFs and discuss the corresponding uncertainties in the NLO predictions. Moreover, we determine the scale and total PDF uncertainties at the LHC and a possible future 100 TeV pp collider.
Highlights
This paper is structured as follows: section 2 describes the basic properties of W±W∓W∓ production at proton-proton colliders and technical details of our next-to-leading order (NLO) calculation
We present a calculation of the next-to-leading order (NLO) electroweak corrections to the production of WWW final states at proton-proton colliders with on-shell W bosons and combine the electroweak with the NLO QCD corrections
As precise predictions are necessary to analyze experimental data, we provide full NLO cross sections for the production of three on-shell W bosons at proton-proton colliders
Summary
At leading order (LO), the production of three W bosons at proton-proton colliders is induced by the two charge-conjugated partonic subprocesses uidj → W−W+W+ and uidj → W+W−W−,. The different Feynman diagrams contributing to W−W+W+ production at LO are shown in figure 1. A selection of NLO real emission Feynman diagrams is depicted in figure 2. Examples of NLO EW loop diagrams are shown in figure 3. The results of the two calculations agree within the Monte Carlo integration errors. To check for consistency, we compare with NLO results on WWW production available in the literature [4,5,6]: tables 1 and 2 show the comparison of our results to the results in the literature and agreement is found within the Monte Carlo integration errors, with the exception of the QCD result of ref. Selection of one-loop Feynman diagrams contributing to the NLO virtual corrections for the process pp → W−W+W+ + X
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