The dijet cross section with a jet veto

Abstract

We study dijet production in proton-proton collisions with a veto on the emission of a third jet in the rapidity region in between the two leading ones. We resum the leading logarithms in the ratio of the transverse momentum of the leading jets and the veto scale and we match this result to leading-order QCD matrix elements. We find that, in order to obtain sensible results, we have to modify the resummation and take into account energy-momentum conservation effects. We compare our theoretical predictions for the gap fraction to experimental data measured by the ATLAS collaboration and find good agreement, although our results are affected by large theoretical uncertainties. We then discuss differences and similarities of our calculation to other theoretical approaches.