High-energy resummation at the LHC: the case of Drell-Yan processes

TL;DR

This paper develops a framework for resumming high-energy logarithms in hadronic processes and applies it to Drell-Yan production at the LHC, showing small but significant corrections to NNLO results.

Contribution

It presents an all-order perturbative QCD calculation for Drell-Yan processes that resums high-energy logarithms, extending previous fixed-order results.

Findings

Resummation corrects NNLO results by a few percent for invariant masses below 100 GeV.

High-energy corrections are relevant for W and Z production at the LHC.

The framework can be applied to other hadronic processes at high energies.

Abstract

We first review the general framework which enables one to resum high-energy logarithms in hadronic processes, both in the evolution of parton densities and in the coefficient functions. We then present an all-order calculation in perturbative QCD of the inclusive Drell Yan and vector boson production in hadron-hadron collisions, in the limit where centre of mass energy is much bigger than the invariant mass of the final state. Our calculation resums leading non-trivial logarithms in the ratio of these two scales. We also study the phenomenological relevance of the high-energy corrections for Drell-Yan processes at the LHC. We find that the resummation corrects the NNLO result by a few percent, for values of the invariant mass of the lepton pair below 100 GeV. Corrections to W, Z production are expected to be of the same order.