Is there a way to do negative lookahead in vim regex?

Question

In Vim, is there a way to search for lines that match say abc but do not also contain xyz later on the line? So the following lines would match:

<

Answer 1

I always find it weird, that you need to escape brackets in vim, so I try to use the "very magic" mode most of the time, activated with \v:

/\vabc(.*xyz)@!