Speaker
Lorenzo Tancredi
(KIT Karlsruhe)
Description
The study of vector boson pair (VV) production at the LHC provides some of the most interesting observables both for Standard Model (SM) and Beyond Standard Model (BSM) physics. In particular, the production of pairs of vector bosons for energies above their production threshold is of crucial importance, on one side as a direct test of the electroweak sector of the standard model and on the other, as it constitutes the natural background for many BSM searches. At the LHC, VV production proceeds mainly through quark-antiquark annihilation, but a sizeable contribution comes also from the gluon-fusion channel which, depending on the final state, can amount for around $10\%$ of the total cross-section. Despite being loop induced, the latter can be enhanced by the large gluon flux at the LHC and moreover, as the kinematically similar $gg \to H$ process, can potentially suffer from large QCD radiative corrections. In order to achieve control on the theoretical uncertainty at the precision expected to be met at the LHC, we expect therefore that the calculation of the NNLO QCD corrections to the quark-antiquark channel should be supplemented by the NLO QCD corrections in the gluon-gluon channel. A fundamental ingredient for these calculations are the two-loop QCD amplitudes for the relevant processes, whose evaluation has been an outstanding task until a recent time. In this spirit, I will present the results of our recent calculation of the NLO QCD corrections to $gg \to ZZ$ and $gg \to WW$, focussing on their impact on LHC phenomenology.
Primary author
Lorenzo Tancredi
(KIT Karlsruhe)
