NLL+NNLO predictions for jet-veto efficiencies in Higgs-boson and Drell-Yan production

A bstract Using the technology of the caesar approach to resummation, we examine the jet-veto efficiency in Higgs-boson and Drell-Yan production at hadron colliders and show that at next-to-leading logarithmic (NLL) accuracy the resummation reduces to just a Sudakov form factor. Matching with NNLO calculations results in stable predictions for the case of Drell-Yan production, but reveals substantial uncertainties in gluon-fusion Higgs production, connected in part with the poor behaviour of the perturbative series for the total cross section. We compare our results to those from powheg with and without reweighting by h q t , as used experimentally, and observe acceptable agreement. In an appendix we derive the part of the NNLL resummation corrections associated with the radius dependence of the jet algorithm.