Two-loop QCD corrections to massless quark–gluon scattering Original Research Article

We present the O(α4s) virtual QCD corrections to the scattering process of massless quark qq̄→gg due to the interference of tree and two-loop amplitudes and to the self-interference of one-loop amplitudes. We work in conventional dimensional regularisation and our results are renormalised in the MS scheme. The structure of the infrared divergences agrees with that predicted by Catani while expressions for the finite remainder are given for the qq̄→gg and the qg→qg (gq̄→gq̄) scattering processes in terms of logarithms and polylogarithms that are real in the physical region. These results, together with those previously obtained for quark–quark scattering, are important ingredients in the next-to-next-to-leading order contribution to inclusive jet production at hadron colliders.