Novel angular dependence in Drell-Yan lepton production via dimension-8 operators

Abstract

We study the effects of dimension-8 operators on Drell-Yan production of lepton pairs at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We identify a class of operators that leads to novel angular dependence not accounted for in current analyses. The observation of such effects would be a smoking-gun signature of new physics appearing at the dimension-8 level. We propose an extension of the currently used angular basis and show that these effects should be observable in future LHC analyses for realistic values of the associated dimension-8 Wilson coefficients.