On electroweak corrections to neutral current Drell–Yan with the POWHEG BOX

Abstract

AbstractMotivated by the requirement of a refined and flexible treatment of electroweak corrections to the neutral current Drell–Yan process, we report on recent developments on various input parameter/renormalization schemes for the calculation of fully differential cross sections, including both on-shell and $$\overline{ \mathrm MS}$$ M S ¯ schemes. The latter are particularly interesting for direct determinations of running couplings at the highest LHC energies. The calculations feature next-to-leading order precision with additional higher order contributions from universal corrections such as $$\varDelta \alpha $$ Δ α and $$\varDelta \rho $$ Δ ρ . All the discussed input parameter/renormalization scheme options are implemented in the package of dedicated to the neutral current Drell–Yan simulation, i.e. , which is used to obtain the presented numerical results. In particular, a comprehensive analysis on physical observables calculated with different input parameter/renormalization    schemes is presented, addressing the Z peak invariant mass region as well as the high energy window. We take the opportunity of reporting also on additional improvements and options introduced in the package after svn revision 3376, such as different options for the treatment of the hadronic contribution to the running of the electromagnetic coupling and for the handling of the unstable Z resonance.