Photoproduction of single inclusive jets at future ep colliders in next-to-leading order QCD

Abstract

A next-to-leading order QCD calculation for single-inclusive jet photoproduction in unpolarized and longitudinally polarized lepton-hadron collisions is presented which consistently includes ``direct'' and ``resolved'' photon contributions. The computation is performed within the ``small-cone approximation'' in a largely analytical form. Phenomenological aspects of jet production at future ep colliders such as the CERN-LHeC and the polarized BNL-eRHIC are discussed, placing particular emphasis on the perturbative stability of the predictions and the possibility to constrain the parton content of the photon.