Resummation of Jet Veto Logarithms at partial N$^3$LL + NNLO for $W^+W^-$ Production at the LHC

Abstract

We compute the resummed on-shell $W^+ W^-$ production cross section under a jet-veto at the LHC to partial N$^3$LL order matched to the fixed order NNLO result. Differential NNLO cross sections are obtained from an implementation of $q_T$ subtraction in Sherpa. The two-loop virtual corrections to the $q \bar q \rightarrow W^+ W^-$ amplitude, used in both fixed order and resummation predictions, are extracted from the public code {\tt qqvvamp}. We perform resummation using soft collinear effective theory (SCET), with approximate beam functions where only the logarithmic terms are included at two-loop. In addition to scale uncertainties from the hard matching scale and the factorization scale, rapidity scale variations are obtained within the analytic regulator approach. Our resummation results show a decrease in the jet-veto cross-section compared to NNLO fixed order predictions, with reduced scale uncertainties compared to NNLL+NLO resummed predictions. We include the loop-induced $gg$ contribution with jet veto resummation to NLL+LO. The prediction shows good agreement with recent LHC measurements.

19 pages, 1 figure