Higher Order QCD Corrections to Electroweak Boson Production at Colliders

Abstract

In this thesis we consider the Next-to-Next-to-Leading Order (NNLO) corrections to single charged electroweak boson production with associated QCD radiation in hadron-hadron collisions, calculated using the antenna subtraction method to regulate infrared (IR) divergences. Results are presented alongside the neutral current case for the inclusive transverse momentum spectrum and subsequent ratios both with and without the addition of state-of-the-art resummation results. In the former case a comparison to CMS data is also provided. We also discuss the phenomenological implications of the results when one or more jets are reconstructed from the QCD radiation. Particular attention is given to the impact on valence quark content of Parton Distribution Functions (PDFs) through a comparison with experimental results from the ATLAS, CMS and LHCb collaborations.

We then discuss the use of fixed-order QCD predictions for inclusive Drell-Yan production in the context of an effective Weinberg angle extraction using triple-differential data taken by the ATLAS collaboration at , using the kinematics to extend the predictions to Next-to-Next-to-Next-to-Leading Order (NLO) for certain parts of the measurement.

Finally, using the antenna subtraction method we derive the NNLO QCD corrections to di-jet production in charged-current Deep Inelastic Scattering (DIS), allowing the first comparison to ZEUS data at this order. These results are then combined with inclusive structure functions using the method of projection-to-Born (p2B) in order to derive the first exclusive fiducial predictions for single jet inclusive production in charged-current DIS to NLO. A comparison to data is performed, where we observe reasonable agreement with the experimental results from ZEUS.