The Effective Vector Boson Approximation in High-Energy Muon Collisions

Richard Ruiz, Antonio Costantini, Fabio Maltoni, Olivier Mattelaer

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arXiv
2111.02442
Date
2021-11-03
Frontier
Accelerator Frontier (AF)
Topical groups
Submitted by
Richard Ruiz

Abstract

Due to the inclination for forward gauge radiation, lepton colliders beyond a few TeV are effectively electroweak (EW) boson colliders, suggesting the treatment of EW bosons as constituents of high-energy leptons. In the context of a muon collider, we revisit the validity of W and Z parton distribution functions (PDFs) at leading order in 2→n process. We systematically investigate universal and quasi-universal power-law and logarithmic corrections that arise when deriving (polarized) weak boson PDFs in the collinear limit. We go on to survey a multitude of 2→n processes at s=2−30 TeV via polarized and unpolarized EW boson fusion/scattering. To conduct this study, we report a public implementation of the Effective W/Z and Weizs\"acker-Williams Approximations, which we collectively call the Effective Vector Boson Approximation, into the Monte Carlo event generator \texttt{MadGraph5\_aMC@NLO}. This implementation lays the groundwork for developing matrix-element matching prescriptions involving EW parton showers and renormalized EW PDFs. To further with this agenda, we give recommendations on using W/Z PDFs.