Gauge bosons production and properties

Studies of the production and decay of gauge bosons are an important probe of the electroweak sector of the standard model. Anomalies in these processes could be a sign of new physics, and are an indirect search for physics beyond the scale that can be directly measured at accelerators. The sensitivity to new physics depends on both the experimental uncertainty and standard model theoretical uncertainty, so reducing both of these is important for any discovery of new physics. This article will focus on the experimental measurements of these processes and specifically on results from the last year at the Tevatron and LHC, though relevant earlier measurements will be referenced. In addition to being sensitive to new physics, gauge boson production is a background to a lot of new physics models and Higgs measurements. Thus, measuring these processes precisely is of the utmost importance. Gauge boson production is also an important way to constrain parton distribution functions (pdfs), and test perturbative and non-perturbative QCD.