Forward Drell-Yan production at the LHC in the BFKL formalism with collinear corrections

TL;DR

This paper enhances the theoretical modeling of forward Drell-Yan production at the LHC by incorporating a BFKL-based unintegrated gluon density with collinear corrections, achieving good agreement with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a BFKL formalism with collinear corrections for the unintegrated gluon density in Drell-Yan production, improving upon previous models.

Findings

Accurately describes the forward Drell-Yan cross section dependence on invariant mass.

Achieves good agreement with LHCb and ATLAS experimental data.

Demonstrates the effectiveness of BFKL formalism with collinear corrections.

Abstract

Motivated by the recent work of Brzemi\'nski, Motyka, Sadzikowski and Stebel in arXiv:1611.04449, where forward Drell--Yan production is studied in proton-proton collisions at the LHC, we improve their calculation by introducing an unintegrated gluon density obtained in arXiv:1209.1353 and arXiv:1301.5283 from a fit to combined HERA data at small values of Bjorken $x$. This gluon density was calculated within the BFKL formalism at next-to-leading order with collinear corrections. We show that it generates a good description of the forward Drell--Yan cross section dependence on the invariant mass of the lepton pair both for LHCb and ATLAS data.