On the Role of Diffractive Production in Precision Studies of W and Z Bosons at the LHC
The increasing precision of measurements at the Large Hadron Collider requires a detailed understanding of all contributions to electroweak boson production. We estimate the impact of single-diffractive W and Z production on precision observables at $\sqrt{s}=5$, 7, 8, and 13 TeV. The non-diffractive baseline is calculated with DYTurbo, while Herwig provides the relative single-diffractive contribution and its transverse-momentum dependence. Factorization breaking is incorporated through a $p_T$-dependent rapidity-gap survival probability calculated with the dynamic multiparton-interaction model of Pythia8. The diffractive Asimov spectrum is constructed by deterministic bin-by-bin reweighting of the same high-numerical-precision DYTurbo cross section used for the non-diffractive baseline. With the non-perturbative parameters profiled, the nominal relative shifts in $α_s$ are -0.0072%, -0.043%, -0.070%, and -0.067% at 5, 7, 8, and 13 TeV, respectively. Five Pythia8 Pomeron-flux and diffractive-PDF configurations give a maximum spread of $9.4\times10^{-6}$ in $Δα_s$. In the W-mass study, the largest bias from an unmodelled survived single-diffractive contribution is 1.58 MeV, and the largest residual after applying the corresponding model-matched template correction is 1.14 MeV. These shifts are below the relevant fit precision, and no phenomenologically significant impact on $m_W$ is expected within the tested models.