Mixed QCD-electroweak corrections to pp →lνl+X at the LHC

We consider the hadroproduction of a massive charged lepton plus the corresponding neutrino through the Drell-Yan mechanism. We present a new computation of the mixed QCD-electroweak (EW) corrections to this process. The cancellation of soft and collinear singularities is achieved by using a formulation of the qT subtraction formalism derived from the next-to-next-to-leading-order QCD calculation for heavy-quark production. For the first time, all the real and virtual contributions due to initial- and final-state radiation are consistently included without any approximation, except for the finite part of the two-loop virtual correction, which is computed in the pole approximation and suitably improved through a reweighting procedure. We demonstrate that our calculation is reliable in both on-shell and off-shell regions, thereby providing the first prediction of the mixed QCD-EW corrections in the entire region of the lepton transverse momentum. The computed corrections are in qualitative agreement with what we obtain in a factorized approach of QCD and EW corrections. At large values of the lepton pT, the mixed QCD-EW corrections are negative and increase in size, to about -20% with respect to the next-to-leading-order QCD result at pT=500 GeV.