Four-lepton production at hadron colliders: AMC@NLO predictions with theoretical uncertainties

Abstract

We use aMC@NLO to study the production of four charged leptons at the LHC, performing parton showers with both HERWIG and Pythia6. Our underlying matrix element calculation features the full next-to-leading order O(α S) result and the O(αS2) contribution of the gg channel, and it includes all off-shell, spin-correlation, virtualphoton-exchange, and interference effects. We present several key distributions together with the corresponding theoretical uncertainties. These are obtained through a process-independent technique that allows aMC@NLO to compute scale and PDF uncertainties in a fully automated way and at no extra CPU-time cost.