Measurement of the high-mass Drell-Yan differential cross-section in pp collisions at √s = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector

This Letter reports a measurement of the high-mass Drell–Yan differential cross-section in protonproton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV at the LHC. Based on an integrated luminosity of 4.9 fb−1, the differential cross-section in the Z/ ! e+e− channel is measured with the ATLAS detector as a function of the invariant mass, mee, in the range 116 < mee < 1500 GeV, for a fiducial region in which both the electron and the positron have transverse momentum pT > 25 GeV and pseudorapidity || < 2.5. A comparison is made to various event generators and to the predictions of perturbative QCD calculations at next-to-next-to-leading order.