Z Boson Production in pp Collisions in the Range of the Center-of-Mass Energy from 7 to 100 TeV

Abstract

High energy physics colliders have been contributing discoveries of and judgments on particles since the early 20th century. One of the well-known high-energy particle colliders is the large hadron collider (LHC), and its proton-proton collision energies have recently been 7, 8 and 13 TeV with the goal of reaching 14 TeV, which is the maximum capacity of the LHC. However, more physics are still to be explored and tested beyond the energy region of the LHC. Therefore, a new collider bigger than the LHC machine, which will be able to collide protons at a 100-TeV center-of-mass energy, is under consideration by the high-energy physics community. To provide insight into the transition from the LHC to the 100-TeV collider, we investigated some properties of the Z process in the collision-energy range from 7 to 100 TeV by using the HERAPDF2.0, MMHT2014, NNPDF3.1 and CT14 next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) parton distribution function (PDF) models at NNLO quantum chromodynamics (QCD). The considered properties are the production rate of the Z boson, the change in the uncertainties caused by the collision energy (PDF, renormalization and factorization scales, strong coupling constant, model and parameterization), the forward-backward asymmetry, and the k-factor of the Z boson.