Single-inclusive jet production in electron-nucleon collisions through next-to-next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD

TL;DR

This work delivers the complete ${\cal O}(\alpha^2\alpha_s^2)$ NNLO corrections to single-inclusive jet production in electron-nucleon collisions, a key process for the Electron-Ion Collider program. The authors employ the ${\cal N}$-jettiness subtraction method, partitioning phase space at ${\cal T}_1^{cut}$ and using SCET to compute the below-cut piece while obtaining the above-cut contribution from an NLO two-jet DIS calculation; the calculation also includes photon-initiated channels and a novel quark-in-lepton distribution arising from $\gamma\to q\bar{q}$ splittings via DGLAP evolution. Validation is performed by reproducing known NNLO DIS structure functions upon integration and by demonstrating independence from ${\cal T}_1^{cut}$, with additional phenomenology for proposed EIC energies showing nontrivial channel interplay across jet kinematics. The results are implemented in the DISTRESS code, enabling precise, fully differential predictions for jet production at the EIC and highlighting the importance of NNLO corrections for accurate proton structure studies.

Abstract

We compute the ${\cal O}(α^2α_s^2)$ perturbative corrections to inclusive jet production in electron-nucleon collisions. This process is of particular interest to the physics program of a future Electron Ion Collider (EIC). We include all relevant partonic processes, including deep-inelastic scattering contributions, photon-initiated corrections, and parton-parton scattering terms that first appear at this order. Upon integration over the final-state hadronic phase space we validate our results for the deep-inelastic corrections against the known next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) structure functions. Our calculation uses the $N$-jettiness subtraction scheme for performing higher-order computations, and allows for a completely differential description of the deep-inelastic scattering process. We describe the application of this method to inclusive jet production in detail, and present phenomenological results for the proposed EIC. The NNLO corrections have a non-trivial dependence on the jet kinematics and arise from an intricate interplay between all contributing partonic channels.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: Feynman diagram for the leading-order process $q(p_1)+l(p_2) \to q_(p_3)+l(p_4)$. We have colored the photon line red, the lepton lines green and the quark lines black.
• Figure 2: Representative Feynman diagrams contributing to the following perturbative QCD corrections at NLO: virtual corrections to the $q(p_1)+l(p_2) \to q(p_3)+l(p_4)$ process (left); real emission correction $q(p_1)+l(p_2) \to q(p_3)+l(p_4)+g(p_5)$ (middle); the process $g(p_1)+l(p_2) \to q_(p_3) +l(p_4)+\bar{q}(p_5)$ (right). We have colored the photon line red, the lepton lines green, the gluon lines blue and the quark lines black.
• Figure 3: Representative Feynman diagrams contributing to the $q(p_1)+\gamma(p_2) \to q(p_3)+g(p_4)$ (left) and $g(p_1)+\gamma(p_2) \to q(p_3)+\bar{q}(p_4)$ scattering processes.
• Figure 4: Representative Feynman diagrams contributing to the $q(p_1)+\bar{q}(p_2) \to g(p_3)+g(p_4)$ (left), $q(p_1)+q^{\prime}(p_2) \to q(p_3)+q^{\prime}(p_4)$ (middle), and $q(p_1)+g(p_2) \to q(p_3)+g(p_4)$ (right) scattering processes.
• Figure 5: Representative Feynman diagrams contributing to the quark-lepton scattering channel at NNLO.