Z+jet production at NNLO

We give a brief overview of our calculation of the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD corrections to Z+jet production in hadronic collisions. Phenomenological results are presented which comprise various differential distributions for 8 TeV proton-proton collisions. A significant reduction of the scale uncertainties is observed throughout as we move from NLO to NNLO. We further discuss how this calculation can be used to describe the inclusive Z-boson production at large transverse momentum. To this end, the theory prediction is compared to the measurements performed by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV. Here, the inclusion of NNLO QCD effects are found to result in a substantial improvement in the agreement between theory and data for the normalised distributions.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, to appear in the proceedings of Loops and Legs in Quantum Field Theory, 24-29 April 2016, Leipzig, German

The colourful antenna subtraction method

We present a general subtraction scheme for NNLO calculations in massless QCD: the \textit{colourful antenna subtraction method}. It is a reformulation of the antenna subtraction approach designed to address some of the limitations of the traditional framework, especially aiming at high-multiplicity processes. In the context of the new formalism, structures needed to locally subtract the infrared-divergent behaviour of real emission corrections are systematically inferred from virtual subtraction terms, relying on the cancellation of infrared singularities and on the correspondence between integrated and unintegrated antenna functions. We illustrate in detail how the colourful antenna subtraction method works up to NNLO. The algorithm is particularly suited to be fully automated for the generation of NNLO subtraction terms for generic processes. We employ the new formalism to assemble the subtraction terms required for the calculation of the NNLO correction to hadronic three-jet production and describe their validation procedure

The colourful antenna subtraction method

We present a general subtraction scheme for NNLO calculations in massless QCD: the colourful antenna subtraction method. It is a reformulation of the antenna subtraction approach designed to address some of the limitations of the traditional framework, especially aiming at high-multiplicity processes. In the context of the new formalism, structures needed to locally subtract the infrared-divergent behaviour of real emission corrections are systematically inferred from virtual subtraction terms, relying on the cancellation of infrared singularities and on the correspondence between integrated and unintegrated antenna functions. We illustrate in detail how the colourful antenna subtraction method works up to NNLO. The algorithm is particularly suited to be fully automated for the generation of NNLO subtraction terms for generic processes. We employ the new formalism to assemble the subtraction terms required for the calculation of the NNLO correction to hadronic three-jet production and describe their validation procedure

Global Optimization by Energy Landscape Paving

We introduce a novel heuristic global optimization method, energy landscape paving (ELP), which combines core ideas from energy surface deformation and tabu search. In appropriate limits, ELP reduces to existing techniques. The approach is very general and flexible and is illustrated here on two protein folding problems. For these examples, the technique gives faster convergence to the global minimum than previous approaches.Comment: to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett. (2002