Weak Vector Boson Production with Many Jets at the LHC $\sqrt{s}= 13$ TeV

TL;DR

This paper provides precise next-to-leading order QCD predictions for W/Z boson production with up to five jets at 13 TeV LHC, including detailed uncertainty assessments and publicly available event samples.

Contribution

It delivers the first comprehensive NLO QCD calculations for W/Z+jets with up to five jets at 13 TeV, including all production channels and leptonic decays at the amplitude level.

Findings

Predictions include up to five jets for W/Z production at 13 TeV.

Uncertainty analysis covers scale dependence and PDF choices.

Event samples are publicly available for further research.

Abstract

Signatures with an electroweak vector boson and many jets play a crucial role at the Large Hadron Collider, both in the measurement of Standard-Model parameters and in searches for new physics. Precise predictions for these multi-scale processes are therefore indispensable. We present next-to-leading order QCD predictions for $W^\pm/Z$+jets at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV, including up to five/four jets in the final state. All production channels are included and leptonic decays of the vector bosons are considered at the amplitude level. We assess theoretical uncertainties arising from renormalization- and factorization-scale dependence by considering fixed-order dynamical scales based on the $H_{\rm T}$ variable as well as on the MiNLO procedure. We also explore uncertainties associated to different choices of parton-distribution functions. We provide event samples that can be explored through publicly available $n$-tuple sets, generated with BlackHat in combination with SHERPA.