Third-Order Fiducial Predictions for Drell-Yan Production at the LHC.

The Drell-Yan process at hadron colliders is a fundamental benchmark for the study of strong interactions and the extraction of electroweak parameters. The outstanding precision of the LHC demands very accurate theoretical predictions with a full account of fiducial experimental cuts. In this Letter we present a state-of-the-art calculation of the fiducial cross section and of differential distributions for this process at third order in the strict fixed-order expansion in the strong coupling, as well as including the all-order resummation of logarithmic corrections.

Dilepton Rapidity Distribution in Drell-Yan Production to Third Order in QCD.

We compute for the first time the lepton-pair rapidity distribution in the photon-mediated Drell-Yan process to next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order in QCD. The calculation is based on the q_{T}-subtraction method, suitably extended to this order for quark-antiquark initiated Born processes. Our results display sizeable QCD corrections at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order over the full rapidity region and provide a fully independent confirmation of the recent results for the total Drell-Yan cross section at this order.

Jet cross sections at the LHC and the quest for higher precision.

We perform a phenomenological study of plus jet, Higgs plus jet and di-jet production at the Large Hadron Collider. We investigate in particular the dependence of the leading jet cross section on the jet radius as a function of the jet transverse momentum. Theoretical predictions are obtained using perturbative QCD calculations at the next-to and next-to-next-to-leading order, using a range of renormalization and factorization scales.

The transverse momentum spectrum of weak gauge bosons at N LL + NNLO.

We present accurate QCD predictions for the transverse momentum ( ) spectrum of electroweak gauge bosons at the LHC for collisions, based on a consistent combination of a NNLO calculation at large and N LL resummation in the small limit. The inclusion of higher order corrections leads to substantial changes in the shape of the differential distributions, and the residual perturbative uncertainties are reduced to the few percent level across the whole transverse momentum spectrum. We examine the ratio of distributions in charged- and neutral-current Drell-Yan production, and study different prescriptions for the estimate of perturbative uncertainties that rely on different degrees of correlation between these processes.