ZZ production at the LHC: NLO QCD corrections to the loop-induced gluon fusion channel

Abstract

We consider QCD radiative corrections to the production of four charged leptons in hadron collisions. We present the computation of the next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the loop-induced gluon fusion contribution. Our predictions include, for the first time, also the quark-gluon partonic channels. The computed corrections, which are formally of O(αS3), turn out to increase the loop-induced Born-level result by an amount ranging from 75% to 71% as s ranges from 8 to 13 TeV. We combine our result with state-of-the-art NNLO corrections to the quark annihilation channel, and present updated predictions for fiducial cross sections and distributions for this process.