W boson production in e⁺e^- collisions in the Weinberg-Salam model

We study W boson production in e⁺e^- collisions in the Weinberg-Salam model. We first estimate the Z⁰ contribution to the process e⁺e^- → W^-e⁺ν. It turns out that this contribution in spite of the enhancement through the Z⁰ propagator gives σ ∼ 10^-38 cm² and is as small as other contributions to this process, discussed by other authors. We conclude that e⁺e^- → W^-e⁺ν is not a good place to look for W's and study next the process e⁺e^- → W^-W⁺ which in spite of its higher threshold is more suitable for W search giving σ ∼ 10^-35 cm². We present explicit formulae and corresponding numerical estimates of the total cross sections and angular distributions for e⁺e^- → W⁺W^-.We also calculate the separate contributions to the latter process coming from various diagrams and their interference terms and conclude that strong cancellations between various contributions should already be expected just above the threshold for the process in question.