Disentangling electroweak effects in Z-boson production

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of including electroweak corrections in Z-boson production predictions to enhance the accuracy of parton distribution functions, especially in light of recent ATLAS measurements.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of electroweak effects in Z-boson production using improved theoretical schemes and public codes, highlighting their significance over PDF uncertainties.

Findings

Electroweak corrections exceed PDF uncertainties in Z-boson mass distributions.

Inclusion of electroweak effects improves the precision of PDF extractions.

Analysis based on ATLAS measurements at different mass regions.

Abstract

Parton distributions with QED corrections open new scenarios for high precision physics. We recall the need for accurate and improved predictions which keeps into account higher order QCD corrections together with electroweak effects. We study predictions obtained with the improved Born approximation and the $G_{\mu}$ scheme by using two public codes: DYNNLO and HORACE. We focus our attention on the Drell-Yan Z-boson invariant mass distribution at low- and high-mass regions, recently measured by the ATLAS experiment and we estimate the impact of each component of the final prediction. We show that electroweak corrections are larger than PDF uncertainties for modern PDF sets and therefore such corrections are necessary to improve the extraction of future PDF sets.