Next-to-leading order QCD predictions for W+3-jet distributions at hadron colliders

Citation Berger, C.F. et al "Next-to-leading order QCD predictions for W+3-jet distributions at hadron colliders. Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Next-to-leading order QCD predictions for W þ 3-jet distributions at hadron colliders We present next-to-leading order QCD predictions for a variety of distributions in W þ 3-jet production at both the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider. We include all subprocesses and incorporate the decay of the W boson into leptons. Our results are in excellent agreement with existing Tevatron data and provide the first quantitatively precise next-to-leading order predictions for the LHC. We include all terms in an expansion in the number of colors, confirming that the specific leading-color approximation used in our previous study is accurate to within 3%. The dependence of the cross section on renormalization and factorization scales is reduced significantly with respect to a leading-order calculation. We study different dynamical scale choices, and find that the total transverse energy is significantly better than choices used in previous phenomenological studies. We compute the one-loop matrix elements using on-shell methods, as numerically implemented in the BLACKHAT code. The remaining parts of the calculation, including generation of the real-emission contributions and integration over phase space, are handled by the SHERPA package.