Mixed QCD$\otimes$QED corrections to on-shell $Z$ boson production at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper calculates the combined QCD and QED corrections to on-shell Z boson production at the LHC, including NLO effects, using a specialized subtraction formalism, and assesses their impact on key observables.

Contribution

It provides the first fully-exclusive computation of mixed QCD⊗QED corrections to on-shell Z production at the LHC, incorporating NLO effects and a novel subtraction method.

Findings

Mixed QCD⊗QED corrections significantly affect Z boson observables.

The subtraction formalism effectively handles the complex corrections.

Results inform more precise LHC phenomenology and measurements.

Abstract

We compute the mixed QCD$\otimes$QED corrections to the production of on-shell $Z$ bosons at the LHC at a fully-exclusive level. We also include the factorised NLO QCD correction to $Z$ boson production and NLO QED correction to $Z$ boson decay into two leptons. We make use of an abelianised version of the nested soft-collinear subtraction formalism to perform this computation. We study the phenomenological impact of the mixed QCD$\otimes$QED corrections for a number of observables relevant for LHC phenomenology.