Complete O(alpha_s^2) Corrections to (2+1) Jet Cross Sections in Deep Inelastic Scattering

Abstract

Complete next-to leading order QCD predictions for (2+1) jet cross sections and jet rates in deep inelastic scattering (DIS) based on a new parton level Monte Carlo program are presented. All relevant helicity contributions to the total cross section are included. Results on total jet cross sections as well as differential distributions in the basic kinematical variables $x,W^2$ and $Q^2$ are shown for HERA energies and for the fixed target experiment E665 at FERMILAB. We study the dependence on the choices of the renormalization scale $\mu_R$ and the factorization scale $\mu_F$ and show that the NLO results are much less sensitive to the variation of $\mu=\mu_F=\mu_R$ than the LO results. The effect of an additional $p_T$ cut to our jet definition scheme is investigated.