J. Niehues

Precise QCD predictions for the production of dijet final states in deep inelastic scattering

The production of two-jet final states in deep inelastic scattering is an important QCD precision observable. We compute it for the first time to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in perturbative QCD. Our calculation is fully differential in the lepton and jet variables and allows one to impose cuts on the jets in both the laboratory and the Breit frame. We observe that the NNLO corrections are moderate in size, except at kinematical edges, and that their inclusion leads to a substantial reduction of the scale variation uncertainty on the predictions. Our results will enable the inclusion of deep inelastic dijet data in precision phenomenology studies.

NNLO QCD corrections to jet production in deep inelastic scattering

A bstractHadronic jets in deeply inelastic electron-proton collisions are produced by the scattering of a parton from the proton with the virtual gauge boson mediating the interaction. The HERA experiments have performed precision measurements of inclusive single jet production and di-jet production in the Breit frame, which provide important constraints on the strong coupling constant and on parton distributions in the proton. We describe the calculation of the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD corrections to these processes, and assess their size and impact. A detailed comparison with data from the H1 and ZEUS experiments highlights that inclusive single jet production displays a better perturbative convergence than di-jet production. We also observe that the event selection cuts in some of the di-jet measurements of both H1 and ZEUS induce an infrared sensitivity that destabilises the perturbative stability of the predictions. Our results open up new opportunities for QCD precision studies with jet production observables in deep inelastic scattering.

NNLO QCD corrections to event orientation in e + e − annihilation

We present a new implementation of the NNLO QCD corrections to three-jet final states and related event-shape observables in electron–positron annihilation. Our implementation is based on the antenna subtraction method, and is performed in the NNLOjet framework. The calculation improves upon earlier results by taking into account the full kinematical information on the initial state momenta, thereby allowing the event orientation to be computed to NNLO accuracy. We find the event-orientation distributions at LEP and SLC to be very robust under higher order QCD corrections.

NNLO predictions for dijet production in diffractive DIS

Cross sections for inclusive dijet production in diffractive deep-inelastic scattering are calculated for the first time in next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) accuracy. These cross sections are compared to several HERA measurements published by the H1 and ZEUS collaborations. We computed the total cross sections, 49 single-differential and five double-differential distributions for six HERA measurements. The NNLO corrections are found to be large and positive. The normalization of the resulting predictions typically exceeds the data, while the kinematical shape of the data is described better at NNLO than at next-to-leading order (NLO). Our results use the currently available NLO diffractive parton distributions, and the discrepancy in normalization highlights the need for a consistent determination of these distributions at NNLO accuracy.