Dijet cross sections in ep collisions: who is afraid of symmetric cuts?

Abstract

Three widely used scenaria for defining cuts on transverse energies of jets in ep collisions are discussed. All of them are shown to suffer from the same sort of unphysical behaviour when the cut regions are subject to additional constraints. This feature is inherent in the very way dijet cross sections are defined and cannot be avoided. In particular, the symmetric cut scenario is shown to be equally suitable for the comparison with NLO QCD calculations as the asymmetric or sum-like ones.