Electroweak radiative corrections toW-boson production at hadron colliders

The complete set of electroweak $O\left(\alpha \right)$ corrections to the Drell-Yan-like production of W bosons is calculated and compared to an approximation provided by the leading term of an expansion about the W-resonance pole. All relevant formulas are listed explicitly, and particular attention is paid to issues of gauge invariance and the instability of the W bosons. A detailed discussion of numerical results underlines the phenomenological importance of the electroweak corrections to W-boson production at the Fermilab Tevatron and at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. While the pole expansion yields a good description of resonance observables, it is not sufficient for the high-energy tail of transverse-momentum distributions, relevant for new-physics searches.