Measurement of the low-mass Drell-Yan differential cross section at $\sqrt{s}$ = 7 TeV using the ATLAS detector

ATLAS Collaboration

Paper

Measurement of the low-mass Drell-Yan differential cross section at $\sqrt{s}$ = 7 TeV using the ATLAS detector

Abstract

The differential cross section for the process

(

) as a function of dilepton invariant mass is measured in pp collisions at

7 TeV at the LHC using the ATLAS detector. The measurement is performed in the

and

channels for invariant masses between 26 GeV and 66 GeV using an integrated luminosity of 1.6 fb

collected in 2011 and these measurements are combined. The analysis is extended to invariant masses as low as 12 GeV in the muon channel using 35 pb

of data collected in 2010. The cross sections are determined within fiducial acceptance regions and corrections to extrapolate the measurements to the full kinematic range are provided. Next-to-next-to-leading-order QCD predictions provide a significantly better description of the results than next-to-leading-order QCD calculations, unless the latter are matched to a parton shower calculation.