Electroweak corrections to the charged-current Drell-Yan process

Abstract

The production of a high-transverse-momentum lepton pair, known as Drell-Yan (DY) process, plays an important role at hadron colliders, such as the Fermilab Tevatron and the CERN LHC, thanks to the large cross section and the clean signature of the final state, with at least one high-transverse-momentum lepton to trigger on. After the LEP and Tevatron precision measurement of the gauge boson masses, the DY processes represent standard candles which can be used for the detector calibration. The production of gauge bosons, in association with jets, is an important background to interesting physics channels, like the top quark pair production. The mass of the W boson will be measured at the LHC from the transverse mass distribution, but also from the ratio (dΣ W/dM ⊥)/(dΣ Z/dM ⊥), with a foreseen final uncertainty of Δm W ≈ 15MeV [1]. The latter, combined with the improvement in the determination of the top quark mass (foreseen with an accuracy of 1–2GeV), will put more stringent bounds in all the precision tests of the Standard Model. The DY processes provide, both in neutral and charged current channels, stringent constraints on the density functions which describe the partonic content of the proton [2]. The important progress in the calculation of the QCD corrections has reduced at the per cent level the residual theoretical uncertainties which affect the DY cross sections; as a consequence, it has been proposed to use them as a luminosity monitor of the collider [3,4]. The large mass tail of the invariant mass distribution represents an important background to the search for new heavy gauge bosons [5].