Next-to-leading order QCD predictions for W+3-jet distributions at hadron colliders

• Main Authors: Berger, Carola (Contributor), Bern, Z. (Author), Dixon, L. J. (Author), Cordero, F. Febres (Author), Forde, D. (Author), Gleisberg, T. (Author), Ita, H. (Author), Kosower, D. A. (Author), Maître, D. (Author)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Physical Society, 2010-03-18T12:28:17Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

We present next-to-leading order QCD predictions for a variety of distributions in W+3-jet production at both the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider. We include all subprocesses and incorporate the decay of the W boson into leptons. Our results are in excellent agreement with existing Tevatron data and provide the first quantitatively precise next-to-leading order predictions for the LHC. We include all terms in an expansion in the number of colors, confirming that the specific leading-color approximation used in our previous study is accurate to within 3%. The dependence of the cross section on renormalization and factorization scales is reduced significantly with respect to a leading-order calculation. We study different dynamical scale choices, and find that the total transverse energy is significantly better than choices used in previous phenomenological studies. We compute the one-loop matrix elements using on-shell methods, as numerically implemented in the BlackHat code. The remaining parts of the calculation, including generation of the real-emission contributions and integration over phase space, are handled by the SHERPA package.
U.S. Department of Energy (Contract Nos. DE-FG03-91ER40662, DE-AC02- 76SF00515, and DE-FC02-94ER40818)