Vector boson production at hadron colliders: transverse-momentum resummation and leptonic decay

We consider the transverse-momentum (qT) distribution of Drell-Yan lepton pairs produced, via W and Z/γ* decay, in hadronic collisions. At small values of qT, we resum the logarithmically-enhanced perturbative QCD contributions up to next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. Resummed results are consistently combined with the known OαS2\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$ \mathcal{O}\left({\alpha}_S^2\right) $$\end{document} fixed-order results at intermediate and large values of qT. Our calculation includes the leptonic decay of the vector boson with the corresponding spin correlations, the finite-width effects and the full dependence on the final-state lepton(s) kinematics. The computation is encoded in the numerical program DYRes, which allows the user to apply arbitrary kinematical cuts on the final-state leptons and to compute the corresponding distributions in the form of bin histograms. We present a comparison of our results with some of the available LHC data. The inclusion of the leptonic decay in the resummed calculation requires a theoretical discussion on the qT recoil due to the transverse momentum of the produced vector boson. We present a qT recoil procedure that is directly applicable to qT resummed calculations for generic production processes of high-mass systems in hadron collisions.