Dimuons in LHC

Abstract

In a hadron collider like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the dimuon channel provides an ideal tool for the discovery of many predicted particles from Beyond Standard Model (BSM) theories such as high mass resonant, or non-resonant states. The high mass resonances like Z' and the high mass non-resonant like contact interactions or extra dimensions should appear in the high mass tail of dimuon distributions. The Drell-Yan process is the main source of high mass opposite sign muon pairs in the Standard Model (SM) which act as the irreducible background of signals of the above mentioned BSM models in proton-proton collisions. Therefore, it is important to study with the highest possible accuracy the Drell-Yan process.In this paper, the expectations of the Drell-Yan process in the dimuon channel at next-to-next-to-leading order in QCD and next-to-leading order in the electroweak corrections are studied in detail. In the present study, a typical generic detector acceptance such as CMS or ATLAS at the LHC at center of mass energy 14 TeV is considered. At the end of this study, estimates of the expected backgrounds for new physics searches in the dimuon final states are given.