Dijet Production in Charged and Neutral Current e^+p Interactions at High Q^2

TL;DR

This paper investigates jet production in high Q^2 charged and neutral current e^+p interactions at HERA, comparing experimental data with NLO QCD calculations, and finds the hadronic final state dynamics are consistent across processes.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed comparison of dijet production in charged and neutral current deep-inelastic scattering at high Q^2, confirming QCD universality.

Findings

NLO QCD describes dijet distributions well in both processes.

Jet distributions are independent of the electroweak scattering type.

Measured multi-jet rates agree with theoretical predictions.

Abstract

Jet production in charged and neutral current events in the kinematic range of Q^2 from 640 to 35000 GeV^2 is studied in deep-inelastic positron-proton scattering at HERA. The measured rate of multi-jet events and distributions of jet polar angle, transverse energy, dijet mass, and other dijet variables are presented. Using parton densities derived from inclusive DIS cross sections, perturbative QCD calculations in NLO are found to give a consistent description of both the neutral and charged current dijet production. A direct, model independent comparison of the jet distributions in charged and neutral current events confirms that the QCD dynamics of the hadronic final state is independent of the underlying electroweak scattering process.