The transverse hadronic energy inW andZ 0 production

A thorough analysis is presented of the hadronic transverse energy produced in association withW± andZ0 weak bosons atp$$\bar p$$ colliders. The complete rapidity and transverse energy distributions are derived, including the perturbative annihilation and Compton terms and the resummation of soft gluons. The first non leading corrections to the corresponding Sudakov exponent are included in full and their effects are discussed. To make contact with the actual data a number of non perturbative inputs is also necessary. We extract this information from minimum bias measurements. A detailed comparison of the resulting theoretical predictions with the available experimental data is finally presented.