Z+jet production at NNLO

TL;DR

This paper presents NNLO QCD corrections to Z+jet production in hadronic collisions, significantly reducing theoretical uncertainties and improving agreement with experimental data at 8 TeV.

Contribution

The work provides the first NNLO QCD calculation for Z+jet production and demonstrates its impact on phenomenological predictions and data comparison.

Findings

Reduced scale uncertainties at NNLO

Improved agreement with ATLAS and CMS data

Enhanced accuracy of differential distributions

Abstract

We give a brief overview of our calculation of the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD corrections to Z+jet production in hadronic collisions. Phenomenological results are presented which comprise various differential distributions for 8 TeV proton-proton collisions. A significant reduction of the scale uncertainties is observed throughout as we move from NLO to NNLO. We further discuss how this calculation can be used to describe the inclusive Z-boson production at large transverse momentum. To this end, the theory prediction is compared to the measurements performed by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV. Here, the inclusion of NNLO QCD effects are found to result in a substantial improvement in the agreement between theory and data for the normalised distributions.