Oct 2016 - Sep 2017

Gluon-induced diboson production at the LHC

by Raoul Roentsch

Europe/London
OC218 (IPPP)

OC218

IPPP

Description
The gluon-induced production of a pair of vector bosons proceeds through a quark loop, and is therefore suppressed by a factor of alpha_s^2 compared to the quark-antiquark production channel. Nevertheless, it affects the total production cross section by 5%-10%, enhanced by the large gluon flux. By analogy with other gluonic processes, it was anticipated that the QCD corrections to gg -> VV would be sizable. I will present recent work on the NLO QCD corrections to gg -> ZZ and gg -> WW, including their impact on phenomenology at the LHC. I will then turn to the off-shell Higgs behavior in the H->VV decay channel, where interference effects with VV production are important. I will describe the recent calculations of NLO QCD corrections to the interference, and try to assess the impact of higher order QCD corrections on the extraction of the Higgs width using off-shell methods at the LHC.