Phenomenology of NNLO jet production at the LHC and its impact on parton distributions

Abstract

We present a systematic investigation of jet production at hadron colliders from a phenomenological point of view, with the dual aim of providing a validation of theoretical calculations and guidance to future determinations of parton distributions (PDFs). We account for all available inclusive jet and dijet production measurements from ATLAS and CMS at 7 and 8 TeV by including them in a global PDF determination, and comparing to theoretical predictions at NNLO QCD supplemented by electroweak (EW) corrections. We assess the compatibility of the PDFs, specifically the gluon, obtained before and after inclusion of the jet data. We compare the single-inclusive jet and dijet observables in terms of perturbative behaviour upon inclusion of QCD and EW corrections, impact on the PDFs, and global fit quality. In the single-inclusive case, we also investigate the role played by different scale choices and the stability of the results upon changes in modelling of the correlated experimental systematics.