Combining next-to-leading order QCD and electroweak radiative corrections toW-boson production at hadron colliders in the powheg framework

The precision measurement of the mass of the W boson is an important goal of the Fermilab Tevatron and the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It requires accurate theoretical calculations which incorporate both higher-order QCD and electroweak corrections, and also provide an interface to parton-shower Monte Carlo programs which make it possible to realistically simulate experimental data. In this paper, we present a combination of the full O(α) electroweak corrections of wgrad2, and the next-to-leading order QCD radiative corrections to W→ν production in hadronic collisions in a single event generator based on the powheg framework, which is able to interface with the parton-shower Monte Carlo programs pythia and herwig. Using this new combined QCD + EW Monte Carlo program for W production, we provide numerical results for total cross sections and kinematic distributions of relevance to the W mass measurement at the Tevatron and the LHC for the processes $pp$, pp̄→W^±→μ^±ν_μ. In particular, we discuss the impact of EW corrections in the presence of QCD effects when including detector resolution effects.