Mueller-Navelet jets in next-to-leading order BFKL: theory versus experiment

Abstract

We study, within QCD collinear factorization and including BFKL resummation at the next-to-leading order, the production of Mueller-Navelet jets at LHC with center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV. The adopted jet vertices are calculated in the approximation of small aperture of the jet cone in the pseudorapidity-azimuthal angle plane. We consider several representations of the dijet cross section, differing only beyond the next-to-leading order, to calculate a few observables related with this process. We use various methods of optimization to fix the energy scales entering the perturbative calculation and compare thereafter our results with the experimental data from the CMS collaboration.

20 pages, 11 figures. Misprints removed in Tables 7 and 8 and in one place of the text; figures and conclusions unchanged; version which incorporates the Erratum accepted by Eur. Phys. J. C