Threshold resummation of Drell-Yan rapidity distributions

Abstract

We present a derivation of the threshold resummation formula for the Drell-Yan rapidity distribution. Our argument is valid for all values of rapidity and to all orders in perturbative QCD and can be applied to all Drell-Yan processes in a universal way, i.e. both for the production of a virtual photon γ^{*} and the production of a vector boson W^{\pm}, Z^{0}. We show that for the fixed-target experiment E866/NuSea used in current parton fits, the NLL resummation corrections are comparable to NLO fixed-order corrections and are crucial to obtain agreement with the data.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Y-dependence of $d^{2}\sigma/(dQ^{2}dY)$ in units of $\textrm{pb}/\textrm{GeV}^2$. The curves are, from top to bottom, the NLO result (red band), the LO+LL resummation (blue band) and the LO (black band). The bands are obtained varying the factorization scale between $\mu^{2}= 2Q^{2}$ and $\mu^{2}=1/2 Q^{2}$.
• Figure 2: Y-dependence of $d^{2}\sigma/(dQ^{2}dY)$ in units of $\textrm{pb}/\textrm{GeV}^2$. The curves are, from top to bottom, the NLO result (red band), the NLO+NLL resummation (green band) and the LO (black band). The bands are obtained as in figure \ref{['LOLLNLO']}.
• Figure 3: Y dependence of $d^{2}\sigma/(dQ^{2}dY)$ in units of $\textrm{pb}/\textrm{GeV}^2$. The curves are, from top to bottom, the NLO result (red band) and the NLO+NLL resummation (green band) together with the E866/NuSea data. The bands are obtained as in figure \ref{['LOLLNLO']}.