QCD$\oplus$QED NNLO corrections to Drell Yan production

TL;DR

This paper calculates mixed QCD and QED corrections to Z boson production in hadronic collisions at NNLO, extending precision and analyzing their phenomenological impact at various collider energies.

Contribution

It provides the first complete NNLO QCD$ imes$QED corrections to Z boson production, including explicit coefficients and phenomenological analysis.

Findings

Mixed corrections are small, at a few per mille level.

Under certain conditions, mixed corrections can compete with pure QCD NNLO.

Factorisation approximation fails to reproduce the exact mixed correction results.

Abstract

We compute the QCD$\times$QED (${\cal{O}}(\alpha_s \alpha)$) mixed and QED$^2$ (${\cal{O}}(\alpha^2)$) corrections to the production of an on-shell $Z$ boson in hadronic collisions. We obtain them by profiting from the calculation of the pure QCD terms after taking the corresponding abelian limits. Therefore, we extend the available knowledge up to complete next-to-next-to leading order precision in QCD$\oplus$QED. We present explicit results for the perturbative coefficients and perform the phenomenological analysis at different collider energies with particular emphasis on the mixed corrections. We study the contribution from the different channels and discuss the scale dependence stabilisation effect. We consider a factorisation approximation for the mixed order terms and show that it fails to reproduce the exact result. We find that the contributions are small, typically at the few per mille level, but that under some kinematical conditions they can compete with the pure QCD NNLO ones.