NNLO QCD corrections to Wbb production at the LHC

NNLO QCD corrections to Wbb production at the LHC

Authors: Heribertus Bayu Hartanto, Rene Poncelet, Andrei Popescu, Simone Zoia

Abstract: We compute theoretical predictions for the production of a W-boson in association with a bottom-quark 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.

Article on arxiv.org