Lepton-pair production at hadron colliders at N3LO in QCD

Abstract

Abstract We compute for the first time the complete corrections at N3LO in the strong coupling constant to the inclusive neutral-current Drell-Yan process including contributions from both photon and Z-boson exchange. Our main result is the computation of the QCD corrections to the inclusive production cross section of an axial-vector boson to third order in the strong coupling in a variant of QCD with five massless quark flavours. Since the axial anomaly does not cancel for an odd number of flavours, we also consistently include non-decoupling effects in the top-quark mass through three loops. We perform a phenomenological study of our results, and we present for the first time predictions for the inclusive Drell-Yan process at the LHC at this order in QCD perturbation theory.