Single-inclusive jet production in electron-nucleon collisions through next-to-next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD

TL;DR

This paper presents a detailed NNLO QCD calculation of inclusive jet production in electron-nucleon collisions, crucial for future Electron Ion Collider experiments, including all relevant processes and validated against known structure functions.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive NNLO perturbative QCD calculation for jet production in electron-nucleon collisions using the N-jettiness subtraction scheme, enabling fully differential predictions.

Findings

NNLO corrections significantly affect jet kinematics.

The calculation includes all relevant partonic channels.

Results are validated against known structure functions.

Abstract

We compute the ${\cal O}(\alpha^2\alpha_s^2)$ perturbative corrections to inclusive jet production in electron-nucleon collisions. This process is of particular interest to the physics program of a future Electron Ion Collider (EIC). We include all relevant partonic processes, including deep-inelastic scattering contributions, photon-initiated corrections, and parton-parton scattering terms that first appear at this order. Upon integration over the final-state hadronic phase space we validate our results for the deep-inelastic corrections against the known next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) structure functions. Our calculation uses the $N$-jettiness subtraction scheme for performing higher-order computations, and allows for a completely differential description of the deep-inelastic scattering process. We describe the application of this method to inclusive jet production in detail, and present phenomenological results for the proposed EIC. The NNLO corrections have a non-trivial dependence on the jet kinematics and arise from an intricate interplay between all contributing partonic channels.