Isolated lepton momenta, in particular their directions are the most precisely measured quantities in pp collisions at LHC. This offers opportunities for multitude of precision measurements. It is of practical importance to verify if precision measur
ements with lep- tons in the final state require all theoretical effects evaluated simultaneously or if QED bremsstrahlung in the final state can be separated without unwanted precision loss. Results for final state bremsstrahlung in the decays of narrow resonances are obtained from the Feynman rules of QED in an unambiguous way and can be controlled with a very high precision. Also for resonances of non-negligible width, if calculations are appropriately performed, such separation from the remaining electroweak effects can be expected. Our paper is devoted to validation that final state QED bremsstrahlung can indeed be separated from the rest of QCD and electroweak effects, in the production and decay of Z and W bosons, and to estimation of the resulting systematic error. The quantitative discussion is based on Monte Carlo programs PHOTOS and SANC, as well as on KKMC which is used for benchmark results. We show, that for a large classes of W and Z boson observables as used at LHC, theoretical error on photonic bremsstrahlung is 0.1 or 0.2%, depending on the program options used. An overall theoretical error on QED final state radiation, i.e. taking into account missing corrections due to pair emission and interference with initial state radiation is estimated respectively at 0.2% or 0.3% again depending on the program option used.
We report on the implementation of an interface between the SANC generator framework for Drell-Yan hard processes, which includes next-to-leading order electroweak (NLO EW) corrections, and the Herwig++ and Pythia8 QCD parton shower Monte Carlos. A s
pecial aspect of this implementation is that the initial-state shower evolution in both shower generators has been augmented to handle the case of an incoming photon-in-a-proton, diagrams for which appear at the NLO EW level. The difference between shower algorithms leads to residual differences in the relative corrections of 2-3% in the p_T(mu) distributions at p_T(mu)>~50 GeV (where the NLO EW correction itself is of order 10%).
