Drell-Yan as a probe of small x partons at the LHC

Abstract

The predictions of Drell-Yan production of low-mass, lepton-pairs, at high rapidity at the LHC, are known to depend sensitively on the choice of factorization and renormalization scales. We show how this sensitivity can be greatly reduced by fixing the factorization scale of the LO contribution based on the known NLO matrix element, so that observations of this process at the LHC can make direct measurements of parton distribution functions in the low x domain; x less than about 10^{-4}.

11 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Parton distributions for the LHC
• New parton distributions for collider physics
• Parton Distributions and QCD at LHCb

Cited by in corpus (10)

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• The exclusive $J/\psi$ process at the LHC tamed to probe the low $x$ gluon
• How to include exclusive $J/\psi$ production data in global PDF analyses
• The Quark and Gluon Structure of the Proton
• Introduction to QCD
• Gluon distribution at very small x from C-even quarkonia production at the LHC
• Improving the Drell-Yan probe of small x partons at the LHC via a k_t cut
• The treatment of the infrared region in perturbative QCD