An NLO QCD effective field theory analysis of $W^+_{}W^-_{}$ production at the LHC including fermionic operators

We study the impact of anomalous gauge boson and fermion couplings on the production of $W^+W^-$ pairs at the LHC. Helicity amplitudes are presented separately to demonstrate the sources of new physics contributions and the impact of QCD and electroweak corrections. The QCD corrections have important effects on the fits to anomalous couplings, in particular when one $W$ boson is longitudinally polarized and the other is transversely polarized. In effective field theory language, we demonstrate that the dimension-6 approximation to constraining new physics effects in $W^+W^-$ pair production fails at $p_T\sim 500-1000$ GeV.
Comment: 23 pages, version published in journal, code posted at https://quark.phy.bnl.gov/Digital_Data_Archive/dawson/ww_2017/WWEFT_NLO.tar.gz