Jet Production in ep Collisions at High Q^2 and Determination of alpha_s

TL;DR

This paper reports on jet production measurements in high-Q^2 ep collisions at HERA, comparing results with QCD predictions and extracting the strong coupling constant alpha_s with high precision.

Contribution

It provides detailed measurements of jet cross sections at high Q^2 and determines alpha_s(M_Z) with improved accuracy using HERA data.

Findings

Jet cross sections agree with NLO QCD calculations.

The extracted alpha_s(M_Z) is 0.1168 with specified uncertainties.

Results support the validity of perturbative QCD at high energies.

Abstract

The production of jets is studied in deep-inelastic ep scattering at large negative four momentum transfer squared 150<Q^2<15000 GeV^2 using HERA data taken in 1999-2007, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 395 pb^-1. Inclusive jet, 2-jet and 3-jet cross sections, normalised to the neutral current deep-inelastic scattering cross sections, are measured as functions of Q^2, jet transverse momentum and proton momentum fraction. The measurements are well described by perturbative QCD calculations at next-to-leading order corrected for hadronisation effects. The strong coupling as determined from these measurements is alpha_s(M_Z) = 0.1168 +/-0.0007 (exp.) +0.0046/-0.0030 (th.) +/-0.0016(pdf).