We present phenomenological results for vector boson pair production at the LHC, obtained using the parton-level next-to-leading order program MCFM. We include the implementation of a new process in the code, pp → γγ, and important updates to existing processes. We incorporate fragmentation contributions in order to allow for the experimental isolation of photons in γγ, W γ, and Zγ production and also account for gluon-gluon initial state contributions for all relevant processes. We present results for a variety of phenomenological scenarios, at the current operating energy of √ s = 7 TeV and for the ultimate machine goal, √ s = 14 TeV. We investigate the impact of our predictions on several important distributions that enter into searches for new physics at the LHC.

We present the implementation of several colorsinglet final-state processes at Next-to-Next-to Leading Order (NNLO) accuracy in QCD to the publicly available parton-level Monte Carlo program MCFM. Specifically we discuss the processesDecays of the unstable bosons are fully included, resulting in a flexible fully differential Monte Carlo code. The NNLO corrections have been calculated using the non-local N -jettiness subtraction approach. Special attention is given to the numerical aspects of running MCFM for these processes at this order. We pay particular attention to the systematic uncertainties due to the power corrections induced by the N -jettiness regularization scheme and the evaluation time needed to run the hybrid openMP/MPI version of MCFM at NNLO on multiprocessor systems.

Abstract:We revisit the hadronic production of the four-lepton final state, e − e + µ − µ + , through the fusion of initial state gluons. This process is mediated by loops of quarks and we provide first full analytic results for helicity amplitudes that account for both the effects of the quark mass in the loop and off-shell vector bosons. The analytic results have been implemented in the Monte Carlo program MCFM and are both fast, and numerically stable in the region of low Z transverse momentum. We use our results to study the interference between Higgs-mediated and continuum production of four-lepton final states, which is necessary in order to obtain accurate theoretical predictions outside the Higgs resonance region. We have confirmed and extended a recent analysis of Caola and Melnikov that proposes to use a measurement of the off-shell region to constrain the total width of the Higgs boson. Using a simple cut-and-count method, existing LHC data should bound the width at the level of 25-45 times the Standard Model expectation. We investigate the power of using a matrix element method to construct a kinematic discriminant to sharpen the constraint. In our analysis the bound on the Higgs width is improved by a factor of about 1.6 using a simple cut on the MEM discriminant, compared to an invariant mass cut m 4l > 300 GeV.

We outline and investigate a set of benchmark simplified models with the aim of providing a minimal simple framework for an interpretation of the existing and forthcoming searches of dark matter particles at the LHC. The simplified models we consider provide microscopic QFT descriptions of interactions between the Standard Model partons and the dark sector particles mediated by the four basic types of messenger fields: scalar, pseudoscalar, vector and axial-vector. Our benchmark models are characterized by four to five parameters, including the mediator mass and width, the dark matter mass and the effective coupling(s). In the gluon fusion production channel we resolve the top quark in the loop and compute full top-mass effects for scalar and pseudoscalar messengers. We show the LHC limits and reach at 8 and 14 TeV for models with all four messenger types. We also outline the complementarity of direct detection, indirect detection and LHC bounds for dark matter searches. Finally, we investigate the effects which arise from extending the simplified model to include potential new physics contributions in production. Using the scalar mediator as an example, we study the impact of heavy new physics loops which interfere with the top-mediated loops. Our computations are performed within the MCFM framework, and we provide fully flexible public Monte Carlo implementation.

In this paper we present a next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) calculation of the process pp → γγ that we have implemented into the parton level Monte Carlo code MCFM. We do not find agreement with the previous calculation of this process in the literature. In addition to the O(α 2 s ) corrections present at NNLO, we include some effects arising at O(α 3 s ), namely those associated with gluon-initiated closed fermion loops. We investigate the role of this process in the context of studies of QCD at colliders and as a background for searches for new physics, paying particular attention to the diphoton invariant mass spectrum. We demonstrate that the NNLO QCD prediction for the shape of this spectrum agrees well with functional forms used in recent data-driven fits.