Next-to-leading-order electroweak corrections to the production of three charged leptons plus missing energy at the LHC

The production of a neutral and a charged vector boson with subsequent decays into three charged leptons and a neutrino is a very important process for precision tests of the Standard Model of elementary particles and in searches for anomalous triple-gauge-boson couplings. In this article, the first computation of next-to-leading-order electroweak corrections to the production of the four-lepton final states μ + μ −e+ ν e, $$ {\mu}^{+}{\mu}^{-}{\mathrm{e}}^{-}{\overline{\nu}}_{\mathrm{e}} $$ , μ + μ − μ + ν μ , and $$ {\mu}^{+}{\mu}^{-}{\mu}^{-}{\overline{\nu}}_{\mu } $$ at the Large Hadron Collider is presented. We use the complete matrix elements at leading and next-to-leading order, including all off-shell effects of intermediate massive vector bosons and virtual photons. The relative electroweak corrections to the fiducial cross sections from quark-induced partonic processes vary between −3% and −6%, depending significantly on the event selection. At the level of differential distributions, we observe large negative corrections of up to −30% in the high-energy tails of distributions originating from electroweak Sudakov logarithms. Photon-induced contributions at next-to-leading order raise the leading-order fiducial cross section by +2%. Interference effects in final states with equal-flavour leptons are at the permille level for the fiducial cross section, but can lead to sizeable effects in off-shell sensitive phase-space regions.