Dijet Production in Charged and Neutral Current e^+p Interactions at High Q^2

Abstract

Jet production in charged and neutral current events in the kinematic range of Q^2 from 640 to 35000 GeV^2 is studied in deep-inelastic positron-proton scattering at HERA. The measured rate of multi-jet events and distributions of jet polar angle, transverse energy, dijet mass, and other dijet variables are presented. Using parton densities derived from inclusive DIS cross sections, perturbative QCD calculations in NLO are found to give a consistent description of both the neutral and charged current dijet production. A direct, model independent comparison of the jet distributions in charged and neutral current events confirms that the QCD dynamics of the hadronic final state is independent of the underlying electroweak scattering process.