Transverse-momentum resummation effects on angular coefficients in Z and W boson hadroproduction

Abstract

We present a comprehensive analysis of the angular coefficients of $Z$ and $W$ boson production at hadron colliders in different kinematical ranges, using data from the ATLAS, LHCb, and CMS Collaborations at the LHC, as well as CDF data at the Tevatron. We provide theoretical predictions obtained by consistently combining the resummation of logarithmically enhanced QCD corrections at small transverse momenta $q_T$ up to next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy (NNLL) with fixed-order calculations at next-to-leading order (NLO), valid at large $q_T$. We quantify the impact of transverse-momentum resummation on the angular coefficients. We find that the inclusion of resummation effects leads to a moderate and systematic improvement in the description of the data in the intermediate $q_T$ region, $q_T \sim 20-50$~GeV, for several angular coefficients, while in the remaining cases it does not degrade the agreement of fixed-order QCD predictions with experimental measurements.