Threshold resummation of Drell-Yan rapidity distributions

We present a derivation of the threshold resummation formula for the Drell-Yan rapidity distribution. Our argument is valid for all values of rapidity and to all orders in perturbative QCD and can be applied to all Drell-Yan processes in a universal way, i.e. both for the production of a virtual photon γ∗ and the production of a vector boson W±, Z0. We show that for the fixed-target experiment E866/NuSea used in current parton fits, the NLL resummation corrections are comparable to NLO fixed-order corrections and are crucial to obtain agreement with the data.