Photon-initiated production of a di-lepton final state at the LHC: cross section versus forward-backward asymmetry studies

Abstract

We discuss the effect of the Photon Initiated (PI) process on the dilepton channel at the LHC. Adopting various QED PDF sets, we evaluate the contribution produced by two resolved photons which is not included in the Equivalent Photon Approximation (EPA). We compare the PI central value as predicted by the CTEQ, MRST and NNPDF collaborations. With the NNPDF2.3QED set of replicas we also estimate the PDF uncertainties on the PI central value. We show the effect of the inclusion of the PI contribution and its PDF uncertainties on neutral heavy Z -boson searches. We explore the two scenarios of narrow and broad resonances, including in the analysis the reconstructed Forward-Backward Asymmetry observable, the latter being less affected by systematics effects.