On electroweak corrections to neutral current Drell-Yan with the POWHEG BOX

Motivated by the requirement of a refined and flexible treatment of electroweak corrections to the neutral current Drell-Yan process, we report on recent developments on various input parameter/renormalization schemes for the calculation of fully differential cross sections, including both on-shell and MSbar schemes. The latter are particularly interesting for direct determinations of running couplings at the highest LHC energies. The calculations feature next-to-leading order precision with additional higher order contributions from universal corrections such as $\Delta \alpha$ and $\Delta \rho$. All the discussed input parameter/renormalization scheme options are implemented in the package of POWHEG-BOX-V2 dedicated to the neutral current Drell-Yan simulation, i.e. Z_ew-BMNNPV, which is used to obtain the presented numerical results. In particular, a comprehensive analysis on physical observables calculated with different input parameter/renormalization schemes is presented, addressing the Z peak invariant mass region as well as the high energy window. We take the opportunity of reporting also on additional improvements and options introduced in the package Z_ew-BMNNPV after svn revision 3376, such as different options for the treatment of the hadronic contribution to the running of the electromagnetic coupling and for the handling of the unstable Z resonance.