On the W&Y interpretation of high-energy Drell-Yan measurements

High-energy neutral and charged Drell--Yan differential cross-section measurements are powerful probes of quark-lepton contact interactions that produce growing-with-energy effects. This paper provides theoretical predictions of the new physics effects at the Next-to-Leading order in QCD and including one-loop EW corrections at the single-logarithm accuracy. The predictions are obtained from SM Monte Carlo simulations through analytic reweighting. This eliminates the need of performing a scan on the new physics parameter space, enabling the global exploration of all the relevant interactions. Furthermore, our strategy produces consistently showered events to be employed for a direct comparison of the new physics predictions with the data, or to validate the unfolding procedure than underlies the cross-section measurements. Two particularly relevant interactions, associated with the W and Y parameters of EW precision tests, are selected for illustration. Projections are presented for the sensitivity of the LHC and of the HL-LHC measurements. The impact on the sensitivity of several sources of uncertainties is quantified.