VECTOR BOSON PRODUCTION AT COLLIDERS: A THEORETICAL REAPPRAISAL

We study the production of vector bosons in hadron-hadron collisions via the Drell-Yan mechanism in QCD. Our treatment of the transverse momentum and rapidity distributions of the produced bosons takes all available theoretical principles and results into account in a systematic way. The resulting qT distribution reduces to the perturbative limit for large qT, includes the summation of soft gluons and reproduces the known results for the total cross section. A full numerical analysis of W and Z cross sections at collider and tevatron energies is made.