Weak radiative corrections to dijet production at hadron colliders

TL;DR

This paper calculates electroweak corrections to dijet production at colliders, showing they can significantly affect high-energy jet distributions, especially at TeV scales, with corrections up to 20%.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of electroweak effects on dijet production, including both tree-level and loop corrections at high energies.

Findings

Weak loop corrections reach about -12% at 3 TeV jets at the LHC.

Electroweak tree-level effects can be positive at the LHC and negative at the Tevatron.

Corrections are smaller for invariant mass distributions compared to transverse momentum spectra.

Abstract

We present the calculation of the most important electroweak corrections to dijet production at the LHC and the Tevatron, comprising tree-level effects of O(\alpha_s\alpha,\alpha^2) and weak loop corrections of O(\alpha_s^2\alpha). Although negligible for integrated cross sections, these corrections can reach 10-20% in the TeV range for transverse jet momenta k_T. Our detailed discussion of numerical results comprises distributions in the dijet invariant mass and in the transverse momenta of the leading and subleading jets. We find that the weak loop corrections amount to about -12% and -10% for leading jets with k_T~3TeV at the 14TeV LHC and k_T~800GeV at the Tevatron, respectively. The electroweak tree-level contributions are of the same generic size and typically positive at the LHC and negative at the Tevatron at high energy scales. Generally the corrections to the dijet invariant mass distributions are smaller by at least a factor of two as compared to the corresponding reach in the k_T distributions, because unlike the k_T spectra the invariant-mass distributions are not dominated by the Sudakov regime at high energy scales.