Vector boson production in hadronic collisions

Abstract

We consider the production of $\gamma^*, W$ and $Z$ vector bosons in hadron-hadron collisions in perturbative QCD. We present results from a new numerical program which gives a full description of the production of the vector bosons and of their decay products. At small $\qt$ the calculation includes resummation of large logarithms and non-perturbative effects. The resummation is matched with the full $O(\alpha_S)$ calculation. In addition, the program correctly reproduces the known $O(\alpha_S)$ cross section when integrated over $\qt$. Besides presenting results for $W$ and $Z$ production at the Tevatron, we also review constraints on the non-perturbative functions using fixed target data on lepton pair production, and make several observations on this topic.