Precise QCD predictions for the production of a Z boson in association with a hadronic jet

Abstract

We compute the cross section and differential distributions for the production of a Z boson in association with a hadronic jet to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in perturbative QCD, including the leptonic decay of the Z boson. We present numerical results for the transverse momentum and rapidity distributions of both the Z boson and the associated jet at the LHC. We find that the NNLO corrections increase the next-to-leading order (NLO) predictions by approximately 1% and significantly reduce the scale variation uncertainty.