NNLO QCD corrections in full colour for jet production observables at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper presents full colour NNLO QCD calculations for jet observables at the LHC, comparing them with experimental data and assessing the significance of subleading colour contributions.

Contribution

It provides the first full colour NNLO QCD corrections for multiple jet observables at the LHC using the antenna subtraction method.

Findings

Subleading colour effects are significant for triply differential distributions.

Full colour calculations improve agreement with experimental data.

Subleading contributions vary with jet cone size.

Abstract

Calculations for processes involving a high multiplicity of coloured particles often employ a leading colour approximation, where only the leading terms in the expansion of the number of colours $N_c$ and the number of flavours $n_f$ are retained. This approximation of the full colour result is motivated by the $1/N_c^2$ suppression of the first subleading terms and by the increasing complexity of including subleading colour contributions to the calculation. In this work, we present the calculations using the antenna subtraction method in the NNLOJET framework for the NNLO QCD corrections at full colour for several jet observables at the LHC. The single jet inclusive cross section is calculated doubly differential in transverse momentum and absolute rapidity and compared with the CMS measurement at 13 TeV. A calculation for dijet production doubly differential in dijet mass and rapidity difference is also performed and compared with the ATLAS 7 TeV data. Lastly, a triply differential dijet cross section in average transverse momentum, rapidity separation and dijet system boost is calculated and compared with the CMS 8 TeV data. The impact of the subleading colour contributions to the leading colour approximation is assessed in detail for all three types of observables and as a function of the jet cone size. The subleading colour contributions play a potentially sizable role in the description of the triply differential distributions, which probe kinematical configurations that are not easily accessed by any of the other observables.