Electroweak Radiative Corrections to Neutral-Current Drell-Yan Processes at Hadron Colliders

We calculate the complete electroweak O(α) corrections to p p (−) → l+l−X(l = e, μ) in the Standard Model (SM) of electroweak interactions. They comprise weak and photonic virtual one-loop corrections as well as real photon radiation to the parton-level processes qq̄ → γ, Z → l+l−. We study in detail the effect of the radiative corrections on the l+l− invariant mass distribution, the cross section in the Z boson resonance region, and on the forward-backward asymmetry, AFB, at the Fermilab Tevatron and the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The weak corrections are found to increase the Z boson cross section by about 1%, but have little effect on the forward-backward asymmetry in the Z peak region. Threshold effects of the W box diagrams lead to pronounced effects in AFB at m(l +l−) ≈ 160 GeV which, however, will be difficult to observe experimentally. At high di-lepton invariant masses, the non-factorizable weak corrections are found to become large. Typeset using REVTEX