Forward Drell–Yan production at the LHC in the BFKL formalism with collinear corrections

Abstract

Motivated by the recent work of Brzemiński, Motyka, Sadzikowski and Stebel in [1], where forward Drell–Yan production is studied in proton–proton collisions at the LHC, we improve their calculation by introducing an unintegrated gluon density obtained in [2] from a fit to combined HERA data at small values of Bjorken x. This gluon density was calculated within the BFKL formalism at next-to-leading order with collinear corrections. We show that it generates a good description of the forward Drell–Yan cross section dependence on the invariant mass of the lepton pair both for LHCb and ATLAS data.