Precision measurements of inclusive and differential Drell-Yan cross sections with the ATLAS detector

Measurements of the Drell-Yan production of W and Z/gamma* bosons at the LHC provide a benchmark of our understanding of perturbative QCD and probe the proton structure in a unique way. The measurements are compared to state-of-the-art calculations at NNLO in QCD. New 7 TeV measurements are performed for W and Z/gamma* bosons integrated and as a function of lepton rapidity and boson mass. Unprecedented precision is reached and strong constraints on parton distribution functions are found. First precise inclusive measurements of W and Z production at 13 TeV are presented. W/Z and W charge ratios profit from a cancellation of experimental uncertainties. The collaboration has also performed a measurement of ratios of the cross sections for the production of single Z bosons and top-quark pairs at various center-of-mass energies which exploit differences in the range of the probed parton momenta. The angular distributions of the Drell-Yan lepton pairs around the Z-boson mass peak probe the underlying QCD dynamic of the Z-boson production. We present a measurement of the complete set of the corresponding angular coefficients in 8 TeV data and compare to different theoretical approaches of QCD and EWK modeling. We also present recent measurements in the di-lepton mass range up to the TeV scale in 8 TeV data, double-differentially in dilepton mass and rapidity. The measurements constrain in particular the photon content of the proton.