Measurements of the vector boson production with the ATLAS detector

¹ Università degli Studi di Genova
² INFN Sezione di Genova

^* e-mail: alessandro.lapertosa@cern.ch

Published online: 26 January 2018

Abstract

Measurements of the Drell-Yan production of W and Z bosons at the LHC provide a benchmark of our understanding of perturbative QCD and probe the proton structure in a unique way. The ATLAS collaboration has performed new high precision measurements at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV. The measurements are performed for W⁺, W^- and Z bosons integrated and as a function of the boson or lepton rapidity and the Z mass. Unprecedented precision is reached and strong constraints on Parton Distribution Functions, in particular the strange density are found. Z boson cross sections are also measured at center-of-mass energies of 8 TeV and 13 TeV, and cross-section ratios to the top-quark pair production have been derived. This ratio measurement leads to a cancellation of systematic effects and allows for a high precision comparison to the theory predictions. The production of jets in association with vector bosons is a further important process to study perturbative QCD in a multi-scale environment. The ATLAS collaboration has performed new measurements of Z boson plus jets cross sections, differential in several kinematic variables, in proton-proton collision data taken at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. The measurements are compared to state-of-the art theory predictions. They are sensitive to higher-order pQCD effects, probe flavour and mass schemes and can be used to constrain the proton structure. In addition, a new measurement of the splitting scales of the k_t jet-clustering algorithm for final states containing a Z boson candidate at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV is presented.