WZ production beyond NLO for high-pT observables

We use the LoopSim and VBFNLO packages to investigate a merged sample of partonic events that is accurate at NLO in QCD simultaneously for the WZ and WZ + jet production processes. In certain regions of phase space such a procedure is expected to account for the dominant part of the NNLO QCD corrections to the WZ production process. For a number of commonly used experimental observables, we find that these corrections are substantial, in the 30-100% range and in some cases their inclusion can reduce scale uncertainties by a factor of two. As in the underlying VBFNLO calculations, we include the leptonic decays of the vector bosons and all off-shell and finite-width effects. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.