NLO QCD corrections to multi-jet production at the LHC with a centre-of-mass energy of [formula omitted

Abstract

We study three and four jet production in hadronic collisions at next-to-leading order accuracy in massless QCD. We cross check results previously obtained by the BlackHat Collaboration for the LHC with a centre-of-mass energy of s=7 TeV and present new results for the LHC operating at 8 TeV. We find large negative NLO corrections reducing the leading order cross sections by about 40–50%. Furthermore we observe an important reduction of the scale uncertainty. In addition to the cross sections we also present results for differential distributions. The dynamical renormalization/factorization scale used in the calculation leads to a remarkably stable K-factor. The results presented here were obtained with the NJet package (Badger et al., 2012) [1], a publicly available library for the evaluation of one-loop amplitudes in massless QCD.