We compute the cross section and differential distributions for the production of a $Z$ boson in association with a hadronic jet to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in perturbative QCD, including the leptonic decay of the $Z$ boson. We present numerical results for the transverse momentum and rapidity distributions of both the $Z$ boson and the associated jet at the LHC. We find that the NNLO corrections increase the NLO predictions by approximately 1% and significantly reduce the scale variation uncertainty.

• Received 16 July 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.022001