Measurement of the production cross section of an isolated photon associated with jets in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV with the ATLAS detector

A measurement of the cross section for the production of an isolated photon in association with jets in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy $\sqrt{s}$ = 7 TeV is presented. Photons are reconstructed in the pseudorapidity range $|\eta^{\gamma}| \lt 1.37$ and with a transverse energy $E_T^\gamma$ > 25 GeV. Jets are reconstructed in the rapidity range $|y^{jet}|$ < 4.4 and with a transverse momentum $p_T^{jet}$ > 20 GeV. The differential cross section $d\sigma/dE_T^\gamma$ is measured, as a function of the photon transverse energy, for three different rapidity ranges of the leading-$p_T$ jet: $|y^{jet}| < 1.2, 1.2 \le |y^{jet}|$ < 2.8 and 2.8 $\le |y^{jet}|$ < 4.4. For each rapidity configuration the same-sign $(\eta^{\gamma}y^{jet}\ge 0)$ and opposite-sign $(\eta^{\gamma}y^{jet}<0)$ cases are studied separately. The results are based on an integrated luminosity of 37 pb$^{-1}$, collected with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Next-to-leading order perturbative QCD calculations are found to be in fair agreement with the data, except for $E_T^{\gamma} \lt 45$ GeV, where the theoretical predictions overestimate the measured cross sections.