Triphoton production at hadron colliders in NNLO QCD

Abstract

We present next-to-next-to-leading-order (NNLO) QCD corrections to the production of three isolated photons in hadronic collisions at the fully differential level. We employ qT subtraction within Matrix and an efficient implementation of analytic two-loop amplitudes in the leading-colour approximation to achieve the first on-the-fly calculation for this process at NNLO accuracy. Numerical results are presented for proton–proton collisions at energies ranging from 7 TeV to 100 TeV. We find full agreement with the 8 TeV results of Ref. [1] and confirm that NNLO corrections are indispensable to describe ATLAS 8 TeV data. In addition, we demonstrate the significance of NNLO corrections for future precision studies of triphoton production at higher collision energies.