NLO QCD corrections to multi-jet production at the LHC with a centre-of-mass energy of sqrt(s)=8 TeV

TL;DR

This paper presents NLO QCD corrections for multi-jet production at the LHC at 8 TeV, showing significant negative corrections and reduced uncertainties, validated against previous results and using the NJet package.

Contribution

It provides new NLO QCD calculations for 3- and 4-jet production at 8 TeV, confirming previous 7 TeV results and demonstrating improved theoretical precision.

Findings

NLO corrections reduce cross sections by 40-50%.

Significant reduction in scale uncertainties.

Stable K-factors with the dynamical scale.

Abstract

We study three and four jet production in hadronic collisions at next-to-leading order accuracy in massless QCD. We cross check results previously obtained by the BlackHat collaboration for the LHC with a centre-of-mass energy of sqrt(s)=7 TeV and present new results for the LHC operating at 8 TeV. We find large negative NLO corrections reducing the leading-order cross sections by about 40-50%. Furthermore we observe an important reduction of the scale uncertainty. In addition to the cross sections we also present results for differential distributions. The dynamical renormalization/factorization scale used in the calculation leads to a remarkably stable K-factor. The results presented here were obtained with the NJet package, a publicly available library for the evaluation of one-loop amplitudes in massless QCD.