Threshold resummation for $Z$-boson pair production at NNLO+NNLL (2409.16375v1)

Abstract: The production of a pair of on-shell $Z$-bosons is an important process at the Large Hadron Collider. Owing to its large production cross section at the LHC, this process is very useful for SM precision studies, electroweak symmetry breaking sector as well as to unravel the possible new physics. In this work, we have performed the threshold resummation of the large logarithms that arise in the partonic threshold limit $z \to 1$, up to Next-to-Next-to-Leading Logarithmic (NNLL) accuracy. The presence of the two-loop contributions in the process dependent resummation coefficient $g_0$ makes the numerical computation a non-trivial task. After matching the resummed predictions to the Next-to-Next-to-Leading order (NNLO) fixed order results, we present the invariant mass distribution to NNLO+NNLL accuracy in QCD for the current LHC energies. We find that in the high invariant mass region ($Q=1$ TeV), while the NNLO corrections are as large as $83\%$ with respect to the leading order, the NNLL contribution enhances the cross section by additional few percent, about $4\%$ for $13.6$ TeV LHC. In this invariant mass region, the conventional scale uncertainties in the fixed order results get reduced from $3.4\%$ at NNLO to about $2.6\%$ at NNLO+NNLL, and this reduction is expected to be more for higher $Q$ values.