Measurement of the high-mass Drell--Yan differential cross-section in pp collisions at sqrt(s)=7 TeV with the ATLAS detector

This Letter reports a measurement of the high-mass Drell-Yan differential cross-section in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV at the LHC. Based on an integrated luminosity of 4.9 fb^-^1, the differential cross-section in the Z/@c^@?->e^+e^- channel is measured with the ATLAS detector as a function of the invariant mass, m_e_e, in the range 116<m_e_e<1500 GeV, for a fiducial region in which both the electron and the positron have transverse momentum p_T>25 GeV and pseudorapidity |@h|<2.5. A comparison is made to various event generators and to the predictions of perturbative QCD calculations at next-to-next-to-leading order.