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Single-inclusive jet production in electron-nucleon collisions through next-to-next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD

We compute the ${\cal O}(α^2α_s^2)$ perturbative corrections to inclusive jet production in electron-nucleon collisions. This process is of particular interest to the physics program of a future Electron Ion Collider (EIC). We include all relevant partonic processes, including deep-inelastic scattering contributions, photon-initiated corrections, and parton-parton scattering terms that first appear at this order. Upon integration over the final-state hadronic phase space we validate our results for the deep-inelastic corrections against the known next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) structure functions. Our calculation uses the $N$-jettiness subtraction scheme for performing higher-order computations, and allows for a completely differential description of the deep-inelastic scattering process. We describe the application of this method to inclusive jet production in detail, and present phenomenological results for the proposed EIC. The NNLO corrections have a non-trivial dependence on the jet kinematics and arise from an intricate interplay between all contributing partonic channels.