NNLO QCD corrections to $Wb\bar{b}$ production at the LHC

Abstract

We compute theoretical predictions for the production of a W-boson in association with a bottomquark pair at hadron colliders at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD, including the leptonic decay of the W-boson, while treating the bottom quark as massless. This calculation constitutes the very first 2 → 3 process with a massive external particle to be studied at such a perturbative order. We derive an analytic expression for the required two-loop five-particle amplitudes in the leading colour approximation employing finite-field methods. Numerical results for the cross section and differential distributions are presented for the Large Hadron Collider at √ s = 8 TeV. We observe an improvement of the perturbative convergence for the inclusive case and for the prediction with a jet veto upon the inclusion of the NNLO QCD corrections.

A detailed investigation of W+c-jet at the LHC

“…The QCD corrections presented here have been computed with the help of the Stripper program, a C++ implementation of the four-dimensional formulation of the sector-improved residue subtraction scheme [43][44][45][46]. With the same code, several V+jets calculations have already been carried out [11,25,[47][48][49][50]. The matrix elements have been obtained from the AvH library [51] for tree-level amplitudes and OpenLoops 2 [52] for the one-loop ones.…”

Infrared-safe flavoured anti-kT jets

“…Recently, several pertinent hadroncollider analyses have appeared, in particular for processes with the following final states: [11][12][13][14] (see also ref. [15] for comparison with predictions using a finite bquark mass), Z + b-jet [16], W + c-jet [17], W + b and b-jets [18]. The algorithm has also been used in the context of b-quark fragmentation into a B-hadron to construct a proxy of a fragmentation function in ref.…”

Two-loop master integrals for a planar topology contributing to pp → $$ t\overline{t}j $$

“…For the case of one off-shell external leg and four massless legs the situation is also almost complete with the planar [22][23][24] and the non-planar hexa-box [25] now known. This progress has allowed the calculation of several five-point two-loop scattering amplitudes [16,19,[26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41] and led to the first NNLO theoretical predictions for 2 → 3 processes [42][43][44][45][46].…”