Measurement of the high-mass Drell–Yan differential cross-section in pp collisions at √s = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Abstract

This Letter reports a measurement of the high-mass Drell–Yan differential cross-section in proton–proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV at the LHC. Based on an integrated luminosity of 4.9 fb^-1, the differential cross-section in the Z/γ^∗ → e+e- channel is measured with the ATLAS detector as a function of the invariant mass, m_ee, in the range 116 < m_ee < 1500 GeV, for a fiducial region in which both the electron and the positron have transverse momentum p_T > 25 GeV and pseudorapidity |η| < 2.5. A comparison is made to various event generators and to the predictions of perturbative QCD calculations at next-to-next-to-leading order.