Scale choice & collinear contributions to Mueller-Navelet jets at LHC energies

TL;DR

This paper examines the stability of cross section calculations for Mueller-Navelet jets at the LHC under scale variations, highlighting the benefits of collinear resummation for more natural scale choices and discussing azimuthal correlation ratios.

Contribution

It demonstrates that collinear resummation leads to more natural scale choices and confirms the stability of azimuthal correlation ratios within the BFKL framework.

Findings

Optimal scales are closer to jet transverse momenta with collinear resummation.

Ratios of azimuthal angle correlations are stable and well described by BFKL.

Collinear resummation improves the perturbative convergence of the calculations.

Abstract

We investigate the stability under variation of the renormalization, factorization and energy scales entering the calculation of the cross section, at next-to-leading order in the BFKL formalism, for the production of Mueller-Navelet jets at the Large Hadron Collider, following the experimental cuts on the tagged jets. To find optimal values for the scales involved in this observable it is possible to look for regions of minimal sensitivity to their variation. We show that the scales found with this logic are more natural, in the sense of being more similar to the squared transverse momenta of the tagged jets, when the BFKL kernel is improved with a resummation of collinear contributions than when the treatment is at a purely next-to-leading order. We also discuss the good perturbative convergence of the ratios of azimuthal angle correlations, which are quite insensitive to collinear resummations and well described by the original BFKL framework.