Vector Boson Production at Hadron Colliders: A Fully Exclusive QCD Calculation at Next-to-Next-to-Leading Order

We consider QCD radiative corrections to the production of $W$ and $Z$ bosons in hadron collisions. We present a fully exclusive calculation up to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD perturbation theory. To perform this NNLO computation, we use a recently proposed version of the subtraction formalism. The calculation includes the $\gamma \mathrm{\text{−}}Z$ interference, finite-width effects, the leptonic decay of the vector bosons, and the corresponding spin correlations. Our calculation is implemented in a parton level Monte Carlo program. The program allows the user to apply arbitrary kinematical cuts on the final-state leptons and the associated jet activity and to compute the corresponding distributions in the form of bin histograms. We show selected numerical results at the Fermilab Tevatron and the LHC.