Drell-Yan lepton angular distributions in perturbative QCD

Abstract

We present a comprehensive comparison of the available experimental data for the Drell-Yan lepton angular coefficients $\lambda$ and $\nu$ to calculations at leading and next-to-leading order of perturbative QCD. To obtain the next-to-leading order corrections, we make use of publicly available numerical codes that allow us to compute the Drell-Yan cross section at second order in perturbation theory and from which the contributions we need can be extracted. Our comparisons reveal that perturbative QCD is able to describe the experimental data overall rather well, especially at colliders, but also in the fixed-target regime. On the basis of the angular coefficients alone, there appears to be little (if any) convincing evidence for effects that go beyond fixed-order collinear factorized perturbation theory, although the presence of such effects is not ruled out.