Electroweak corrections to hadronic production of W bosons at large transverse momenta Original Research Article

To match the precision of present and future measurements of W-boson production at hadron colliders electroweak radiative corrections must be included in the theory predictions. In this paper we consider their effect on the transverse momentum (image) distribution of W bosons, with emphasis on large image. We evaluate the full electroweak image corrections to the processes image and image including virtual and real photonic contributions. We present the explicit expressions in analytical form for the virtual corrections and provide results for the real corrections, discussing in detail the treatment of soft and collinear singularities. We also provide compact approximate expressions which are valid in the high-energy region, where the electroweak corrections are strongly enhanced by logarithms of image. These expressions describe the complete asymptotic behaviour at one loop as well as the leading and next-to-leading logarithms at two loops. Numerical results are presented for proton–proton collisions at image and proton–antiproton collisions at image. The corrections are negative and their size increases with image. At the LHC, where transverse momenta of image or more can be reached, the one- and two-loop corrections amount up to −40% and +10%, respectively, and will be important for a precise analysis of W production. At the Tevatron, transverse momenta up to image are within reach. In this case the electroweak corrections amount up to −10% and are thus larger than the expected statistical error.