Status of QCD precision predictions for Drell-Yan rapidity distributions

TL;DR

This paper advances the precision of Drell-Yan process predictions at colliders by computing NNLO QCD distributions with fiducial cuts, comparing multiple codes, and addressing perturbative instabilities through resummation techniques.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive NNLO QCD calculation for Drell-Yan distributions with fiducial cuts and introduces a resummation method to stabilize predictions under symmetric lepton transverse momentum cuts.

Findings

Excellent agreement among four different computational codes.

Fiducial cut power corrections are essential for accurate predictions.

Resummation stabilizes fixed-order predictions under symmetric cuts.

Abstract

We compute differential distributions for Drell-Yan processes at the LHC and the Tevatron colliders at next-to-next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD, including fiducial cuts on the decay leptons in the final state. The comparison of predictions obtained with four different codes shows excellent agreement, once linear power corrections from the fiducial cuts are included in those codes that rely on phase-space slicing subtraction schemes. For Z-boson production we perform a detailed study of the symmetric cuts on the transverse momenta of the decay leptons. Predictions at fixed order in perturbative QCD for those symmetric cuts, typically imposed in experiments, suffer from an instability. We show how this can be remedied by an all-order resummation of the fiducial transverse momentum spectrum, and we comment on the choice of cuts for future experimental analyses.