NNLO QCD study of polarised W+W− production at the LHC

Abstract

Longitudinal polarisation of the weak bosons is a direct consequence of Electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism providing an insight into its nature, and is instrumental in searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. We perform a polarisation study of the diboson production in the pp →e+veμ−v¯μ$$ {\mathrm{e}}^{+}{v}{\mathrm{e}}{\mu}^{-}{\overline{v}}{\mu } $$ process at NNLO QCD in the fiducial setup inspired by experimental measurements at ATLAS. This is the first polarisation study at NNLO. We employ the double-pole approximation framework for the polarised calculation, and investigate NNLO effects arising in differential distributions.