Next-to-leading order electroweak corrections to off-shell WWW production at the LHC

Triboson processes allow for a measurement of the triple and quartic couplings of the Standard Model gauge bosons, which can be used to constrain anomalous gauge couplings. In this paper we calculate the next-to-leading order electroweak corrections to fully off-shell W$^{−}$W$^{+}$W$^{+}$ production, namely the production of a $ {\ell}_1^{-}{\ell}_2^{+}{\ell}_3^{+}{\overline{\nu}}_{\ell_1}{\nu}_{\ell_2}{\nu}_{\ell_3} $ final state with (ℓ$_{i}$ = e, μ), including all triple, double, single and non resonant topologies and interferences of diagrams with all different vector boson (W, Z, γ) intermediate states. We find large cancellations of the electroweak correction to the $ q\overline{q} $ -induced channel, which includes the exchange of virtual electroweak gauge bosons, and photon-induced jet radiation processes. This accidental compensation is found to be strongly phase space and observable dependent. The resulting corrections in a suitably defined fiducial region thus amount to −2.0%, but rise rapidly for other observables.