High-precision QCD at hadron colliders: Electroweak gauge boson rapidity distributions at next-to-next-to leading order

Charalampos Anastasiou; Lance Dixon; Kirill Melnikov; Frank Petriello

doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.69.094008

High-precision QCD at hadron colliders: Electroweak gauge boson rapidity distributions at next-to-next-to leading order

Charalampos Anastasiou, Lance Dixon, Kirill Melnikov, and Frank Petriello

Phys. Rev. D 69, 094008 – Published 19 May 2004

Abstract

We compute the rapidity distributions of W and Z bosons produced at the Fermilab Tevatron and the CERN LHC through next-to-next-to leading order in QCD. Our results demonstrate remarkable stability with respect to variations of the factorization and renormalization scales for all values of rapidity accessible in current and future experiments. These processes are therefore “gold-plated”: current theoretical knowledge yields QCD predictions accurate to better than 1%. These results strengthen the proposal to use W and Z production to determine parton-parton luminosities and constrain parton distribution functions at the LHC. For example, LHC data should easily be able to distinguish the central parton distribution fit obtained by MRST from that obtained by Alekhin.

Received 23 December 2003

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.69.094008

Authors & Affiliations

Charalampos Anastasiou^1,*, Lance Dixon^1,†, Kirill Melnikov^2,‡, and Frank Petriello^1,3,§

¹Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94309, USA
²Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822, USA
³Department of Physics, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA

^*Email address: babis@slac.stanford.edu
^†Email address: lance@slac.stanford.edu
^‡Email address: kirill@phys.hawaii.edu
^§Email address: frankjp@pha.jhu.edu

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Vol. 69, Iss. 9 — 1 May 2004

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