Probing the Weak Mixing Angle at high energies at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper proposes measuring the energy dependence of the electroweak mixing angle at high energies using LHC data, aiming to test the Standard Model and constrain new physics through Drell-Yan processes.

Contribution

It introduces a method to determine the running of the electroweak mixing angle at TeV scales using LHC measurements and a dedicated Monte Carlo implementation.

Findings

Potential to confirm Standard Model predictions at TeV energies.

Constraints on new electroweak states can be derived.

Feasibility of future LHC analyses for this measurement.

Abstract

The electroweak mixing angle is a fundamental parameter of the theory of electroweak interactions. Its value has been measured precisely at the $\mathrm{Z}$-pole at colliders. In this contribution, we propose to exploit measurements of Neutral-Current Drell-Yan production at the Large Hadron Collider at large invariant dilepton masses to determine the energy scale dependence (running) of the electroweak mixing angle in the $\bar{\text{MS}}$ renormalisation scheme, $\sin^2\theta_{W,\ell}^{\bar{\text{MS}}}(\mu)$. Such a measurement can be used to confirm the Standard Model predictions for the $\bar{\text{MS}}$ running at $\text{TeV}$ scales, and to set model-independent constraints on new states with electroweak quantum numbers. To this end, we make use of a dedicated implementation of $\sin^2\theta_{W,\ell}^{\bar{\text{MS}}}(\mu)$ in the POWHEG-BOX-V2 Monte Carlo event generator, which we use to explore the potential of future analyses using the data of the LHC Run 3 and High-Luminosity.