Comparison of Next-to-Leading Order Calculations for Jet Cross Sections in Deep-Inelastic Scattering

TL;DR

This study rigorously cross-checks four NLO jet cross-section programs for deep-inelastic scattering, revealing that DISENT and DISASTER++ are the most consistent in NLO across representative HERA-like phase space. MEPJET tends to undershoot by about 5–8% in extreme regions, while JETVIP's results are highly sensitive to the phase-space slicing parameter $y_{\rm cut}$, though they can align with the others at intermediate cut values. The LO predictions agree across all programs to within $\sim$0.2%, but the NLO program discrepancies emphasize the importance of cutoff control and method choice in precision QCD predictions. Overall, the work informs experimental analyses by identifying reliable NLO implementations and highlighting cutoff-related caveats in phase-space slicing approaches.

Abstract

We compare different next-to-leading order calculations of jet cross sections in deep-inelastic scattering as implemented in the programs DISASTER++, DISENT, JETVIP and MEPJET. In all phase space regions under study DISENT and DISASTER++ agree better than 2%. MEPJET shows systematic deviations of being typically 5-8% lower than the other programs. The JETVIP results show a significant dependence on the phase space slicing parameter $y_{\rm cut}$. In the cases where the $y_{\rm cut}$ dependence within $10^{-4} \le y_{\rm cut} \le 10^{-3}$ is smaller than 3% the JETVIP results are often comparable with the DISENT and DISASTER++ results.