NLO QCD corrections to multi-jet production at the LHC with a centre-of-mass energy of sqrt(s)=8 TeV

Abstract

We study three and four jet production in hadronic collisions at next-to-leading order accuracy in massless QCD. We cross check results previously obtained by the BlackHat collaboration for the LHC with a centre-of-mass energy of sqrt(s)=7 TeV and present new results for the LHC operating at 8 TeV. We find large negative NLO corrections reducing the leading-order cross sections by about 40-50%. Furthermore we observe an important reduction of the scale uncertainty. In addition to the cross sections we also present results for differential distributions. The dynamical renormalization/factorization scale used in the calculation leads to a remarkably stable K-factor. The results presented here were obtained with the NJet package, a publicly available library for the evaluation of one-loop amplitudes in massless QCD.

10+9 pages, 20 figures, 15 tables. v2: reference added. additional table of comparisons with known results at 7 TeV. published version