We present the QCD analysis of the out-of-event-plane momentum distribution in DIS events with high $p_t$ jets. The achieved accuracy allows the measurement of the running coupling and the study of non-perturbative effects, in particular the test of universality of power corrections in a new experimental regime.
We present a determination of the gluon polarisation Delta g/g in the nucleon, based on the longitudinal double-spin asymmetry of DIS events with a pair of large transverse-momentum hadrons in the final state. The data were obtained by the COMPASS experiment at CERN using a 160 GeV/c polarised muon beam scattering off a polarised ^6LiD target. The gluon polarisation is evaluated by a Neural Network approach for three intervals of the gluon momentum fraction x_g covering the range 0.04 < x_g < 0.27. The values obtained at leading order in QCD do not show any significant dependence on x_g. Their average is Delta g/g = 0.125 +/- 0.060 (stat.) +/- 0.063 (syst.) at x_g=0.09 and a scale of mu^2 = 3 (GeV/c)^2.
Heavy quarkonium production at high transverse momentum ($p_T$) in hadronic collisions is explored in the QCD factorization approach. We find that the leading power in the $1/p_T$ expansion is responsible for high $p_T$ regime, while the next-to-leading power contribution is necessary for the low $p_T$ region. We present the first numerical analysis of the scale evolution of coupled twist-2 and twist-4 fragmentation functions (FFs) for heavy quarkonium production and demonstrate that the QCD factorization approach is capable of describing the $p_T$ spectrum of hadronic $J/psi$ production at the LHC.
We report on investigations concerning the production of large transverse momentum jets in DIS diffractive dissociation. These processes constitute a new class of events that allow for a clean test of perturbative QCD and of the hard (perturbative) pomeron picture. The measurement of the corresponding cross sections might possibly serve to determine the gluon density of the proton.
A new method of extracting diffractive parton distributions is presented which avoids the use of Regge theory ansatz and is in much closer relation with the factorisation theorem for diffractive hard processes.
We discuss the azimuthal angle decorrelation of Mueller-Navelet jets at hadron colliders and forward jets in Deep Inelastic Scattering within the BFKL framework with a NLO kernel. We stress the need of collinear improvements to obtain good perturbative convergence. We provide estimates of these decorrelations for large rapidity differences at the Tevatron, LHC and HERA.