| Electroweak gauge boson production is a critical component of physics studies performed at hadron colliders. It serves as a 'standard candle' at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In this thesis, various aspects of Z boson production at hadron colliders are considered.;We introduce an improved version of the simulation code FEWZ ( Fully Exclusive W and Z Production) for hadron collider production of lepton pairs through the Drell-Yan process at next-to-next-to-leading-order in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). The program is fully differential in the phase space of leptons and additional hadronic radiation. We discuss improvements in performance and user customization through phase-space constraints and predefined histograms, illustrating the new features by presenting numerous phenomenological results for LHC physics.;Considering new physics effects to electroweak gauge boson production at hadron colliders, we study the supersymmetric QCD corrections to dilepton production with an associated jet at the LHC. We investigate these effects to the integrated cross section and the kinematic distributions of the final state leptons and jet.;Electroweak gauge bosons are intimately related to electroweak symmetry breaking, which is achieved in the Standard Model (SM) by the Higgs boson, a scalar particle. Extending the SM scalar sector with new color-octet scalars, we investigate the phenomenology of (8, 2)1/2 doublets by studying their properties and production mechanisms at the LHC. Studying these color-octet scalars provides a window to the underlying Yukawa structure of the scalar sector. We discuss the discovery potential of color-octet scalars at the LHC and their implications on adjoint SU(5) grand unified theories. |
