The impact of the LHC Z-boson transverse momentum data on PDF determinations

Abstract

The LHC has recently released precise measurements of the transverse momentum distribution of the Z-boson that provide a unique constraint on the structure of the proton. Theoretical developments now allow the prediction of these observables through next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in perturbative QCD. In this work we study the impact of incorporating these latest advances into a determination of parton distribution functions (PDFs) through NNLO including the recent ATLAS and CMS 7 TeV and 8 TeV $p_T^Z$ data. We investigate the consistency of these measurements in a global fit to the available data and quantify the impact of including the $p_T^Z$ distributions on the PDFs. The inclusion of these new data sets significantly reduces the uncertainties on select parton distributions and the corresponding parton-parton luminosities. In particular, we find that the $p_T^Z$ data ultimately leads to a reduction of the PDF uncertainty on the gluon-fusion and vector-boson fusion Higgs production cross sections by about 30%, while keeping the central values nearly unchanged.

36 pages, 18 figures

References in corpus (16)

• Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis
• Parton distributions in the LHC era: MMHT 2014 PDFs
• Vector boson production at hadron colliders: a fully exclusive QCD calculation at NNLO
• Electroweak gauge boson production at hadron colliders through O(alpha_s^2)
• FEWZ 2.0: A code for hadronic Z production at next-to-next-to-leading order
• Measurement of the $Z/{\gamma }^{\ast }$ boson transverse momentum distribution in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector
• Measurement of the shape of the boson rapidity distribution for p\bar{p}-> Z/gamma*-> e+e- +X events produced at sqrt(s) of 1.96 TeV
• Inclusive $W$ and $Z$ production in the forward region at $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV
• The N-jettiness soft function at next-to-next-to-leading order
• Electroweak corrections to hadronic production of W bosons at large transverse momenta
• Measurement of the cross-section for Z->e+e- production in pp collisions at sqrt{s}=7TeV
• Measurement of the electron charge asymmetry in inclusive W production in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV
• APFEL Web: a web-based application for the graphical visualization of parton distribution functions
• Inclusive top-pair production phenomenology with TOPIXS
• Measurement of beauty and charm production in deep inelastic scattering at HERA and measurement of the beauty-quark mass
• Modeling NNLO jet corrections with neural networks

Cited by in corpus (17)

• Parton distributions from LHC, HERA, Tevatron and fixed target data: MSHT20 PDFs
• The Path to Proton Structure at One-Percent Accuracy
• A Monte Carlo global analysis of the Standard Model Effective Field Theory: the top quark sector
• The PDF4LHC21 combination of global PDF fits for the LHC Run III
• Fiducial Drell-Yan production at the LHC improved by transverse-momentum resummation at N${}^4$LL+N${}^3$LO
• Third order fiducial predictions for Drell-Yan at the LHC
• Fiducial $q_T$ resummation of color-singlet processes at N${}^3$LL+NNLO
• PineAPPL: combining EW and QCD corrections for fast evaluation of LHC processes
• The $q_T$ and $\Delta \varphi$ spectra in W and Z production at the LHC at N${}^3$LL'+N${}^2$LO
• Towards parton distribution functions with small-$x$ resummation: HELL 2.0
• Analytic results for deep-inelastic scattering at NNLO QCD with the nested soft-collinear subtraction scheme
• Drell-Yan Transverse-Momentum Spectra at N${}^3$LL${}^{\prime }$ and Approximate N${}^4$LL with SCETlib
• Determination of the strong-coupling constant from the $Z$-boson transverse-momentum distribution
• Infrared Renormalons in Kinematic Distributions for Hadron Collider Processes
• W-boson production in TMD factorization
• Improving quark flavor separation with forward W and Z production at LHCb
• Measurements of the differential cross sections of the production of Z + jets and $\gamma$ + jets and of Z boson emission collinear with a jet in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=$ 13 TeV