Precise Predictions for W + 3 Jet Production at Hadron Colliders

We report on the first next-to-leading order QCD computation of W + 3-jet production in hadronic collisions including all partonic subprocesses. We compare the results with CDF data from the Tevatron, and find excellent agreement. The renormalization and factorization scale dependence is reduced substantially compared to leading-order calculations. The required one-loop matrix elements are computed using on-shell methods, implemented in a numerical program, BlackHat. We use the SHERPA package to generate the real-emission contributions and to integrate the various contributions over phase space. We use a leading-color (large-N_c) approximation for the virtual part, which we confirm in W + 1,2-jet production to be valid to within three percent. The present calculation demonstrates the utility of on-shell methods for computing next-to-leading-order corrections to processes important to physics analyses at the Large Hadron Collider.