ATLAS measurements of Drell-Yan lepton-pair production as probes of the standard model

Measurements of Drell-Yan lepton-pair production cross sections and associated angular correlations can provide unique insight into perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics in the absence of colour flow between initial and final states, the V-A nature of electroweak interactions, as well as enhance the knowledge of parton distribution functions in the proton. Drell-Yan production is also an important source of background for other Standard-Model processes such as Higgs-boson production as well as for new phenomena, particularly at high dilepton invariant mass, and so must be evaluated precisely at the Large Hadron Collider. The measurements presented in this note are based on approximately 5 fb-1 of data collected at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV in 2011 with the ATLAS detector based at the CERN Laboratory. (authors)