Scale choice and collinear contributions to Mueller–Navelet jets at LHC energies

We investigate the stability under variation of the renormalization, factorization and energy scales entering the calculation of the cross section, at next-to-leading order in the BFKL formalism, for the production of Mueller–Navelet jets at the Large Hadron Collider, following the experimental cuts on the tagged jets. To find optimal values for the scales involved in this observable it is possible to look for regions of minimal sensitivity to their variation. We show that the scales found with this logic are more natural, in the sense of being more similar to the squared transverse momenta of the tagged jets, when the BFKL kernel is improved with a resummation of collinear contributions than when the treatment is at a purely next-to-leading order. We also discuss the good perturbative convergence of the ratios of azimuthal angle correlations, which are quite insensitive to collinear resummations and well described by the original BFKL framework.