Measurement of electroweak production of a W boson and two forward jets in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV

TL;DR

This paper reports the first measurement of the electroweak production cross section of a W boson with two forward jets in proton-proton collisions at 8 TeV, confirming the Standard Model predictions.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental cross section measurement for electroweak W boson production with two jets at 8 TeV, using CMS data and comparing with theoretical models.

Findings

Measured cross section: 0.42 pb with uncertainties

Result consistent with Standard Model predictions

First such cross section measurement in this process

Abstract

A measurement is presented of the cross section for the electroweak production of a W boson in association with two jets in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV. The data set was collected with the CMS detector and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 19.3 inverse femtobarns. The measured fiducial cross section for W bosons decaying to electrons or muons and for pT(j1) > 60 GeV, pT(j2) > 50 GeV, |eta(j)| < 4.7, and m(jj) > 1000 GeV is 0.42 +/- 0.04 (stat) +/- 0.09 (syst) +/- 0.01 (lumi) pb. This result is consistent with the standard model leading-order prediction of 0.50 +/- 0.02 (scale) +/- 0.02 (PDF) pb obtained with MADGRAPH5_aMC@NLO 2.1 interfaced to PYTHIA 6.4. This is the first cross section measurement for this process.