Towards the two-loop electroweak corrections to the Drell-Yan process: the infrared structure

A bstract We discuss the lepton-pair production process in Quantum Electrodynamics. We present the ultraviolet-renormalised and infrared-subtracted finite contribution of the second-order virtual corrections to the inclusive lepton-pair production cross section $$ u\overline{u}\to {e}^{+}{e}^{-} $$ u u ¯ → e + e − . The results are obtained within a new computational framework, OCEANN, developed in view of the evaluation of the exact two-loop electroweak virtual corrections to high-energy scattering processes. One of the key methodological features in this approach is the representation of the scattering amplitude with arbitrary precision at every stage of the calculation. The analysis in QED allows us to address the treatment of the infrared structure of the process and it can be easily extended to the complete electroweak Standard Model case. The perfect agreement with the literature, for this subset of corrections, provides a non trivial validation of the general framework.