Drell-Yan production at NNLL′+NNLO matched to parton showers

Abstract

We present results for Drell-Yan production from the geneva Monte-Carlo framework. We combine the fully differential next-to-next-to leading order (NNLO) calculation with higher-order resummation in the 0-jettiness resolution variable. The resulting parton-level events are further combined with parton showering and hadronization provided by pythia8. The 0-jettiness resummation is carried out to NNLL′, which consistently incorporates all singular virtual and real NNLO corrections. It thus provides a natural perturbative connection between the NNLO calculation and the parton shower regime, including a systematic assessment of perturbative uncertainties. In this way, inclusive observables are correct to NNLO, up to small power corrections in the resolution cutoff. Furthermore, the perturbative accuracy of zero-jet-like resummation variables is significantly improved beyond the parton shower approximation. We provide comparisons with LHC measurements of Drell-Yan production at 7 TeV from ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb. As already observed in e+e- collisions, for resummation-sensitive observables, the agreement with data is noticeably improved by using a lower value of αs(MZ)=0.1135.