The Drell-Yan process in NNLO QCD

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive NNLO QCD calculation for W and Z boson production in hadron collisions, including realistic effects and the ability to apply arbitrary kinematic cuts for detailed distribution analysis.

Contribution

It provides a fully exclusive NNLO QCD calculation for vector boson production, incorporating interference, finite-width, decay, and spin effects with realistic kinematic cuts.

Findings

Numerical results for W and Z production at NNLO

Inclusion of interference and decay effects

Flexible application of kinematic cuts

Abstract

We consider the production of W and Z bosons in hadron collisions. We present a selection of numerical results obtained through a fully exclusive calculation up to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD perturbation theory. We include the $\gamma$--$Z$ interference, finite-width effects, the leptonic decay of the vector bosons and the corresponding spin correlations. The calculation is completely realistic, since it allows us to apply arbitrary kinematical cuts on the final-state leptons and the associated partons, and to compute the corresponding distributions in the form of bin histograms.