Mixed QCD-electroweak corrections to dilepton production at the LHC in the high invariant mass region

TL;DR

This paper calculates mixed QCD-electroweak corrections to high-mass dilepton production at the LHC, revealing significant effects at TeV scales and reducing theoretical uncertainties.

Contribution

It provides the first fully differential computation of mixed QCD-electroweak corrections in the high invariant mass region for dilepton production.

Findings

Corrections reach -1% at 200 GeV invariant mass.

Corrections increase to -3% at 3 TeV invariant mass.

Including mixed corrections reduces electroweak input uncertainty below 1%.

Abstract

We compute mixed QCD-electroweak corrections to the neutral-current Drell-Yan production of a pair of massless leptons in the high invariant mass region. Our computation is fully differential with respect to the final state particles. At relatively low values of the dilepton invariant mass, $m_{\ell \ell} \sim 200$ GeV, we find unexpectedly large mixed QCD-electroweak corrections at the level of -1%. At higher invariant masses, $m_{\ell \ell} \sim 1$ TeV, we observe that these corrections can be well approximated by the product of QCD and electroweak corrections. Hence, thanks to the well-known Sudakov enhancement of the latter, they increase at large invariant mass and reach e.g. -3% at $m_{\ell \ell} = 3$ TeV. Finally, we note that the inclusion of mixed corrections reduces the theoretical uncertainty related to the choice of electroweak input parameters to below the percent level.