The single jet inclusive cross section at HERA in next-to-leading order QCD

Abstract

We present the first next-to-leading order calculation of the single jet inclusive cross section at the ep collider HERA. Both the “resolved” and “direct” contributions are calculated to this order. We verify that our results are much less sensitive to the choice of renormalisation/factorisation scales than the leading order results. We examine the possibility of using this cross section to measure the parton distribution functions of the photon, in particular the poorly known gluon distribution.