The physics of hadronic jets

Abstract This article summarizes the main results obtained in the study of hard collisions at the CERN proton–antiproton collider. These results include the first, unambiguous observation of jet production at high transverse momenta in hadronic collisions, as expected from parton–parton scattering at large angles. Other types of hard parton collisions, such as the production of direct photons and of heavy flavours, and the measurement of W and Z bosons with high transverse momenta, are also reviewed in this article. All of these processes can be described in the framework of perturbative QCD.