Measurement of the effective leptonic electroweak mixing angle and Drell-Yan forward-backward asymmetry using pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV

TL;DR

This paper reports a highly precise measurement of the effective leptonic weak mixing angle using Drell-Yan dilepton events from proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV, confirming Standard Model predictions with unprecedented collider precision.

Contribution

First measurement of the effective leptonic weak mixing angle at a hadron collider with precision comparable to LEP and SLD, utilizing a large dataset and advanced PDF sets.

Findings

Measured ff = 0.23157 b1 0.00031

Total uncertainty includes statistical, experimental, theoretical, and PDF uncertainties

Results agree with Standard Model predictions

Abstract

A measurement of the effective leptonic weak mixing angle $\sin^2\theta_\mathrm{eff}^\ell$ is presented using the forward-backward asymmetry in Drell-Yan dilepton events produced in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV. The data sample corresponds to 137 fb$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity and consists of dimuon and dielectron events, including the forward electrons reconstructed beyond the coverage of the CMS tracking detectors. Using the CT18Z set of the parton distribution functions (PDF), which provides the best coverage of the central values extracted with the other global PDFs, we obtain $$\sin^2\theta^\ell_\mathrm{eff} = 0.23157 \pm 0.00031,$$ where the total uncertainty includes the statistical uncetainties (0.00010), as well as the correlated experimental (0.00015), theoretical (0.00009), and PDF (0.00027) systematic uncertainties. The measured value agrees well with the Standard Model prediction. This is the most precise measurement at a hadron collider with comparable precision to the two most precise results obtained at LEP and SLD.