Direct Photon Production at Next-to–Next-to-Leading Order

Campbell, John M.; Ellis, R. Keith; Williams, Ciaran

Abstract

We present the first calculation of direct photon production at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) accuracy in QCD. For this process, although the final-state cuts mandate only the presence of a single electroweak boson, the underlying kinematics resembles that of a generic vector boson plus jet topology. In order to regulate the infrared singularities present at this order, we use the N-jettiness slicing procedure, applied for the first time to a final state that at the Born level includes colored partons but no required jet. We compare our predictions to ATLAS 8 TeV data and find that the inclusion of the NNLO terms in the perturbative expansion, supplemented by electroweak corrections, provides an excellent description of the data with greatly reduced theoretical uncertainties.

Citation

Campbell, J. M., Ellis, R. K., & Williams, C. (2017). Direct Photon Production at Next-to–Next-to-Leading Order. Physical Review Letters, 118(22), Article 222001. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.118.222001

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 10, 2017
• Online Publication Date: May 31, 2017
• Publication Date: May 31, 2017
• Deposit Date: Jul 6, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 6, 2017
• Journal: Physical Review Letters
• Print ISSN: 0031-9007
• Electronic ISSN: 1079-7114
• Publisher: American Physical Society
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 118
• Issue: 22
• Article Number: 222001
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.118.222001
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1353822