A comprehensive analysis of Drell-Yan production uncertainties and mass effects at moderate and low dilepton masses

A bstract We present a thorough investigation of the sources of uncertainties to the Drell-Yan production using state-of-the-art predictions for both neutral and charged current channels, focusing on the low invariant mass region. Differential predictions for the invariant mass spectrum are provided at N 3 LO supplemented with exact charm and bottom quark mass effects calculated at $$ \mathcal{O}\left({\alpha}_s^2\right) $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>O</mml:mi> <mml:mfenced> <mml:msubsup> <mml:mi>α</mml:mi> <mml:mi>s</mml:mi> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:msubsup> </mml:mfenced> </mml:math> . The impact of PDF choices (including approximate N 3 LO), scale variations, the variation of the strong coupling constant, and impact heavy quark mass effects on the distributions is studied in detail. We also comment on the correlation of high-energy astrophysical processes with the low-mass DY region.