Electroweak radiative corrections to neutral-current Drell-Yan processes at hadron colliders

We calculate the complete electroweak $\mathcal{O}\left(\alpha \right)$ corrections to $p\stackrel{\left(-\right)}{p}\to l^{+}{l}^{-}X(l=e,\mu )$ in the standard model (SM) of electroweak interactions. They comprise weak and photonic virtual one-loop corrections as well as real photon radiation to the parton-level processes $q\overline{q}\to \gamma ,\overrightarrow{Z}{l}^{+}{l}^{-}.$ We study in detail the effect of the radiative corrections on the $l^{+}{l}^{-}$ invariant mass distribution, the cross section in the Z boson resonance region, and on the forward-backward asymmetry $A_{\mathrm{FB}}$ at the Fermilab Tevatron and the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The weak corrections are found to increase the Z boson cross section by about 1%, but have little effect on the forward-backward asymmetry in the Z peak region. Threshold effects of the W box diagrams lead to pronounced effects in $A_{\mathrm{FB}}$ at ${m(l}^{+}{l}^{-})\approx 160\mathrm{GeV}$ which, however, will be difficult to observe experimentally. At high dilepton invariant masses, the nonfactorizable weak corrections are found to become large.