Electroweak boson production at large transverse momentum in double polarized $pp$ scattering at next-to-leading order accuracy

Abstract

We compute the next-to-leading order corrections to the cross section for the production of electroweak gauge bosons ($Z$, $W^\pm$ and $\gamma^*$) with large transverse momentum in double (longitudinally) polarized hadronic collisions. The calculation is fully performed in the HVBM scheme within dimensional regularization with a careful treatment of issues arising due to the appearance of $\gamma^5$ in polarization projectors and axial couplings. We study the phenomenological consequences of the NLO corrections at the level of both the double polarized cross section and the corresponding asymmetries at RHIC kinematics.