Phenomenology of the Z-boson plus jet process at NNLO

Abstract

We present a detailed phenomenological study of Z-boson production in association with a jet through next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in perturbative QCD. Fiducial cross sections and differential distributions for both 8 TeV and 13 TeV LHC collisions are presented. We study the impact of different parton distribution functions (PDFs) on predictions for the Z+jet process. Upon inclusion of the NNLO corrections, the residual scale uncertainty is reduced such that both the total rate and the transverse momentum distributions can be used to discriminate between various PDF sets.

Comments: 16 pages, 10 figures, 2 tables; published version. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1602.06965