Abstract:
At the LHC, Drell-Yan dilepton production could usher in new physics that interacts with quarks and leptons. While this could be the much-anticipated Z' appearing as a Breit-Wigner peak in the invariant mass spectrum, a non-resonant entity may show up as a collective signal in spectra of both the invariant mass and scattering angle. I will show that at the LHC Run-2, (1) dark matter and mediators, while hiding from missing energy-based searches, can show up in Drell-Yan events via radiative corrections, threshold effects and interferences; the resulting spectra can reveal dark matter's mass, self-conjugation property, spin, and chirality of interactions, (2) constraints on leptoquarks from Drell-Yan spectra often surpass the sensitivity of direct searches, and are set to overtake limits from low-energy precision measurements of atomic parity violation.