Hadronic lepton-pair production beyond the leading order in perturbative QCD

Hadronic lepton-pair production in perturbative QCD is calculated to order $\text{g}{}^{\mathrm{<mtext>2</mtext>}}$ to be usable in combination with the existing calculation of the anomalous dimension of order $\text{g}{}^{\mathrm{<mtext>4</mtext>}}$. The structure function of the subprocess $\text{q}\text{+}\text{q}\text{→ γ +}$ anything in an arbitrary covariant gauge for gluons is found to have gauge-dependent contributions which are exactly cancelled by contributions from operator matrix elements to give the gauge-independent “coefficient function” for lepton-pair production in the minimal subtraction scheme. This provides a consistency check of the perturbative QCD recipe. A comparison is made with other existing calculations.