QCD ⊕ QED NNLO corrections to Drell-Yan production

Abstract

We compute the QCD×QED [O(αsα)] mixed and QED2 [O(α2)] corrections to the production of an on-shell Z boson in hadronic collisions. We obtain them by profiting from the calculation of the pure QCD terms after taking the corresponding Abelian limits. Therefore, we extend the available knowledge up to complete next-to-next-to-leading-order precision in QCDQED. We present explicit results for the perturbative coefficients and perform the phenomenological analysis at different collider energies with particular emphasis on the mixed corrections. We study the contribution from the different channels and discuss the scale dependence stabilization effect. We find that the contributions compete with the pure QCD NNLO ones under relevant kinematical conditions for the LHC, despite the fact that they are small, typically at the few per mille level.