Exploring the LHC Landscape with Dileptons

Abstract

The dilepton decay channels provide clean signatures and are an ideal hunting ground for high mass resonant, like Z', or non-resonant, like contact interactions or extra dimensions, searches at the LHC. The production of high invariant mass opposite sign lepton pairs in proton-proton collisions in the Standard Model is dominated by the Drell-Yan process. In addition to this photon or Z exchange mediated mechanism, photons radiated by the incoming protons can collide and produce lepton pairs. In this paper detailed calculations of the Drell-Yan process at next-to-next-to-leading order in QCD and next-to-leading order in the electroweak corrections, augmented with the photon-induced effects, are presented in the typical acceptance of a multi-purpose LHC detector at center of mass energy 13 TeV. Estimates of the expected backgrounds for new physics searches are provided for dilepton invariant masses up to the LHC kinematic limit.

25 pages, 2 tables, 13 figures, LaTeX; expanded the results with the new LUXqed_plus_PDF4LHC15 photon PDF set to include the dielectron channel

References in corpus (8)

• LHAPDF6: parton density access in the LHC precision era
• Search for high-mass dilepton resonances in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector
• How bright is the proton? A precise determination of the photon parton distribution function
• Search for physics beyond the standard model in dilepton mass spectra in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV
• Search for narrow resonances in dilepton mass spectra in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 13 TeV and combination with 8 TeV data
• Search for contact interactions and large extra dimensions in the dilepton channel using proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector
• Photon-initiated processes at high mass
• Combining NNPDF3.0 and NNPDF2.3QED through the APFEL evolution code