Threshold resummation for $W$-boson pair production at NNLO+NNLL

Abstract

We present results for threshold resummation of the invariant mass distribution, for on-shell production of a pair of $W$-bosons at next-to-next-to-leading order + next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic (NNLO+NNLL) accuracy in QCD. Owing to its sensitivity to the self-interactions between gauge bosons, this process is important to investigate at the energies of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We achieve this resummation by exploiting the factorization properties of the soft and virtual parts of the partonic cross-section. Our analysis has been carried out for the invariant mass distribution up to $Q$ = 2500 GeV. At this highest $Q$ we find that, for 13.6 TeV LHC, the NNLL resummation enhances the NNLO cross-sections by about $6.3\%$ and reduces the conventional scale uncertainties from 6.8\% at NNLO to 4.1\% at NNLO+NNLL. We also estimate the intrinsic uncertainties due to the non-perturbative parton distribution functions at the highest perturbative order, for both fixed-order and resummed results, to be around 3\% for $Q \sim$ 2000 GeV.