| We measure the production cross-section of the Z boson in the dimuon decay channel in pp collisions at s = 7 TeV. The measurement is based on data collected by the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider between April and July 2010. The amount of data collected was 331 nb-1, containing 109 Z boson candidates decaying to muons. The background level for our measurement is very small, which we estimate using Monte Carlo simulation. We use data-driven techniques to extract experimental efficiencies as well as the muon momentum scale and resolution. We measure sigma Z/gamma* x BR(Z/gamma* → mu +mu-) = 0.87 +/- 0.08 (stat) +/- 0.05 (sys) +/- 0.10 (lum) nb, which is in agreement with the Standard Model expectation at next-to-next-to-leading-order accuracy in QCD. |
