Abstract

We consider the hadroproduction of a massive charged lepton plus the corresponding neutrino through the Drell-Yan mechanism. We present a new computation of the mixed QCD-EW corrections to this process. The cancellation of soft and collinear singularities is achieved by using a formulation of the $q_T$ subtraction formalism derived from the next-to-next-to-leading order QCD calculation for heavy-quark production. For the first time, all the real and virtual contributions due to initial- and final-state radiation are consistently included without any approximation, except for the finite part of the two-loop virtual correction, which is computed in the pole approximation and suitably improved through a reweighting procedure. We demonstrate that our calculation is reliable in both on-shell and off-shell regions, thereby providing the first prediction of the mixed QCD-EW corrections in the entire region of the lepton transverse momentum. The computed corrections are in qualitative agreement with what we obtain in a factorised approach of QCD and EW corrections. At large values of the lepton $p_T$, the mixed QCD-EW corrections are negative and increase in size, to about $-20\%$ with respect to the next-to-leading order QCD result at $p_T=500\,$GeV.

Highlights

  • The production of lepton pairs through the Drell-Yan (DY) mechanism [1] is the most classic hard-scattering process at hadron colliders

  • All the partonic channels are included in our calculation, as will be shown below, the dominant contribution is given by the quark-antiquark and quark-gluon channels

  • We have presented a new computation of the mixed QCD-EW corrections to charged-lepton

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Summary

INTRODUCTION

The production of lepton pairs through the Drell-Yan (DY) mechanism [1] is the most classic hard-scattering process at hadron colliders. The mixed QCD-QED corrections to the inclusive production of an on-shell Z boson were obtained in Ref. [26] through an abelianization procedure from the NNLO QCD results [7,8] This calculation was extended to the fully differential level for off-shell Z boson production and decay into a pair of neutrinos (i.e., without final-state radiation) in Ref. The computation of the complete two-loop amplitude for the neutral current dilepton production process was discussed in Ref. At variance with previous work [32,33], we use the PA only to evaluate the finite part of the genuine twoloop contribution To this purpose, we carry out the required on-shell projection by using the W boson twoloop form factor recently presented in Ref.

HARD VIRTUAL FUNCTION IN THE POLE APPROXIMATION
NUMERICAL RESULTS
Validation of the pole approximation
Results on the OðαSαÞ correction
SUMMARY

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