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{arxiv.2205.01687,
title = {NNLO QCD corrections to $Wb\bar{b}$ production at the LHC},
author = {Heribertus Bayu Hartanto and Rene Poncelet and Andrei Popescu and Simone Zoia},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.01687},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
6 pages, 3 figure, analytical expressions for the two-loop amplitudes are provided in the ancillary files, numerical results for the differential cross section are provided in the ancillary files. v2: fixed minor typos in the text