Measurements of dijet azimuthal decorrelations and extraction of alphaS at ATLAS

The production of jets at hadron colliders provides stringent tests of perturbative QCD. We present a measurement of the rapidity and transverse momentum dependence of dijet azimuthal decorrelations, using the quantity RΔϕ. This quantity specifies the fraction of the inclusive dijet events in which the azimuthal opening angle of the two jets with the highest transverse momenta is less than a given value of the parameter Δϕmax. RΔϕ is measured in proton-proton collisions at √s=8 TeV as a function of the dijet rapidity interval, the event total scalar transverse momentum, and Δϕmax. Predictions of a perturbative QCD calculation at next-to-leading order in the strong coupling with corrections for non-perturbative effects describe the data well in the whole kinematic region. The data are used to determine the strong coupling αS and to study its running for momentum transfers from 260 GeV to above 1.6 TeV. An analysis that combines data at all momentum transfers results in αS(mZ)=0.1127−0.0027+0.0063.