A Next-to-leading Order Calculation of Hadronic Three Jet Production

One of the difficulties in interpreting experimental results is in assessing the uncertainty to be associated with the theoretical calculation. This is particularly true in QCD where the coupling is quite strong and one expects higher order corrections to be significant. Typically, one characterizes theoretical uncertainty by the dependence on the renormalization scale μ. Since we don’t actually know how to choose μ or even a range of μ, the uncertainty associated with scale dependence is somewhat arbitrary. One motivation for performing next-to-leading order (NLO) calculations is to reduce the scale dependence associated with the calculation. However, this is not the only benefit of an NLO calculation. There are times when the LO calculation is a bad estimator of the physical process. It may be that leading order kinematics artificially forbids the most important physical process. It could also be that the NLO corrections are simply large. Even if the overall NLO correction is rela-