Precise QCD predictions for W-boson production in association with a charm jet

Abstract

The production of a $W$-boson with a charm quark jet provides a highly sensitive probe of the strange quark distribution in the proton. Employing a novel flavour dressing procedure to define charm quark jets, we compute $W$+charm-jet production up to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD. We study the perturbative stability of production cross sections with same-sign and opposite-sign charge combinations for the $W$ boson and the charm jet. A detailed breakdown according to different partonic initial states allows us to identify particularly suitable observables for the study of the quark parton distributions of different flavours.

Comments: 26 pages, 15 figures, 5 tables