Exploring the LHC Landscape with Dileptons

Understand

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.