Complete electroweak corrections to diphoton production via gluon fusion at the LHC

RESUMO

We present a complete calculation of the next-to-leading order (NLO) electroweak corrections to the loop-induced gluon-fusion process $gg\to\gamma\gamma$ at the LHC, including the full third-generation quark and the Higgs boson contributions for the first time. To efficiently evaluate the large number of multi-scale two-loop Feynman integrals, we employ a numerical approach based on differential equations with an optimized basis. Our results show that, although the NLO electroweak corrections to the phase-space-integrated cross section remain at the sub-percent level, they can reach about $-10\%$ in the tails of the diphoton invariant-mass and photon transverse-momentum distributions. Moreover, the diphoton invariant-mass distribution exhibits rich and intriguing structures, including a dip-bump structure in the Higgs-threshold region and a mild enhancement near the top-quark pair threshold. These features make the electroweak corrections indispensable for future precision studies of diphoton production at the LHC.