Next-to-leading order QCD corrections to W+W-gamma and ZZ gamma production with leptonic decays

The computation of the O(alpha(s)) QCD corrections to the cross sections for W+W-gamma and ZZ gamma production in hadronic collisions is presented. We consider the case of a real photon in the final state, but include full leptonic decays of the W and Z bosons. Numerical results for the LHC and the Tevatron are obtained through a fully flexible parton level Monte Carlo program based on the structure of the VBFNLO program, allowing an easy implementation of arbitrary cuts and distributions. We show the dependence on scale variations of the integrated cross sections and provide evidence that next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections strongly modify the LO predictions for observables at the LHC both in magnitude and in shape.
We would like to thank Christoph Englert and Michael Rauch for helpful discussions, and Malgorzata Worek, for the comparison with HELAC. This research was supported in part by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft via the Sonderforschungsbereich/Transregio SFB/TR- 9 “Computational Particle Physics”. F.C. acknowledges a postdoctoral fellowship of the Generalitat Valenciana (Beca Postdoctoral d’Excel.lència) and partial support by European FEDER and Spanish MICINN under grant FPA2008-02878. The Feynman diagrams in this paper were drawn using Axodraw