Precise QCD predictions for the production of a Z boson in association with a hadronic jet

TL;DR

This paper provides highly precise NNLO QCD predictions for Z boson production with a jet at the LHC, improving accuracy and reducing uncertainties in theoretical calculations.

Contribution

The work presents the first NNLO QCD calculations for Z+jet production including leptonic decay, enhancing the precision of theoretical predictions.

Findings

NNLO corrections increase NLO predictions by about 1%

Significant reduction in scale variation uncertainty at NNLO

Provides detailed transverse momentum and rapidity distributions

Abstract

We compute the cross section and differential distributions for the production of a Z boson in association with a hadronic jet to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in perturbative QCD, including the leptonic decay of the Z boson. We present numerical results for the transverse momentum and rapidity distributions of both the Z boson and the associated jet at the LHC. We find that the NNLO corrections increase the next-to-leading order (NLO) predictions by approximately 1% and significantly reduce the scale variation uncertainty.