We present next-to-leading order QCD predictions for a variety of distributions in $W+3$-jet production at both the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider. We include all subprocesses and incorporate the decay of the $W$ boson into leptons. Our results are in excellent agreement with existing Tevatron data and provide the first quantitatively precise next-to-leading order predictions for the LHC. We include all terms in an expansion in the number of colors, confirming that the specific leading-color approximation used in our previous study is accurate to within 3%. The dependence of the cross section on renormalization and factorization scales is reduced significantly with respect to a leading-order calculation. We study different dynamical scale choices, and find that the total transverse energy is significantly better than choices used in previous phenomenological studies. We compute the one-loop matrix elements using on-shell methods, as numerically implemented in the BlackHat code. The remaining parts of the calculation, including generation of the real-emission contributions and integration over phase space, are handled by the SHERPA package.

• Received 24 July 2009

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.80.074036