Speaker: Lance Dixon (CERN & SLAC)

Title: Electroweak Vector Boson Production in Association with Jets at the LHC

Abstract: The production of W and Z bosons in association with multiple 
jets at hadron colliders probes important aspects of QCD dynamics, and 
forms an important class of backgrounds to new physics searches.  With 
the increase in energy from the Tevatron to the LHC, new kinematic 
regions open up, in which weak bosons can be energetically subdominant 
to the jets. Because the LHC is a pp machine, W bosons are produced 
primarily left-handed, even at large transverse momentum, which strongly 
impacts their decays to leptons. Recently the production rates for W 
bosons with up to four additional jets, and Z bosons with up to three 
jets, have been computed at next-to-leading-order in QCD, allowing more 
precise theoretical predictions of these processes to confront the 
initial LHC data.