Jet vetoes versus giant K-factors in the exclusive Z+1-jet cross section

Abstract

We perform a detailed study of the exclusive Z+1-jet cross section at the 13 TeV LHC, motivated by the importance of similar exclusive cross sections in understanding the production of the Higgs boson in the W^+W^- final state. We point out a feature of the ATLAS analysis that has significant impact on the theoretical predictions: the jet-isolation criterion implemented by ATLAS effectively allows dijet events where an energetic jet is collinear to a final-state lepton. This process contains a giant $K$-factor arising from the collinear emission of a Z-boson from the dijet configuration. This overwhelms the effect of the jet-veto logarithms, making it difficult to test their resummation in this process. We provide numerical results that demonstrate the interplay between the jet-veto logarithms and the giant K-factor in the theoretical prediction. We study several observables, including the transverse momentum distributions of the leading jet and the Z-boson, in the exclusive Z+1-jet process, and discuss their sensitivity to both the giant K-factor and the jet-veto logarithms. We suggest a modified isolation criterion that removes the giant K-factor and allows for a direct test of the jet-veto resummation framework in the exclusive Z+1-jet process.

24 pages, 7 figures, 5 tables. Analysis and discussion extended to 13 TeV. Version published in PRD

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• W-boson plus jet differential distributions at NNLO in QCD
• Phenomenology of the Z-boson plus jet process at NNLO
• A comparison of NNLO QCD predictions with 7 TeV ATLAS and CMS data for $V$+jet processes
• Measurement of the differential cross sections for the associated production of a W boson and jets in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 13 TeV
• Measurement of $W$ boson angular distributions in events with high transverse momentum jets at $\sqrt{s}=$ 8 TeV using the ATLAS detector
• Electroweak, QCD and flavour physics studies with ATLAS data from Run 2 of the LHC
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• NNLO phenomenology using N-jettiness subtraction