Measurement of the Drell--Yan triple-differential cross section in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 8$ TeV

ATLAS Collaboration

Paper

Measurement of the Drell--Yan triple-differential cross section in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 8$ TeV

Abstract

This paper presents a measurement of the triple-differential cross section for the Drell--Yan process

where

is an electron or a muon. The measurement is performed for invariant masses of the lepton pairs,

, between

and

GeV using a sample of

collisions data at a centre-of-mass energy of

TeV collected by the ATLAS detector at the LHC in 2012. The data are presented in bins of invariant mass, absolute dilepton rapidity,

, and the angular variable

between the outgoing lepton and the incoming quark in the Collins--Soper frame. The measurements are performed in the range

in the muon channel, and extended to

in the electron channel. The cross sections are used to determine the

boson forward-backward asymmetry as a function of

and

. The measurements achieve high-precision, below the percent level in the pole region, excluding the uncertainty in the integrated luminosity, and are in agreement with predictions. These precision data are sensitive to the parton distribution functions and the effective weak mixing angle.