Theoretical status and prospects for top-quark pair production at hadron colliders

TL;DR

This paper updates theoretical predictions for top-quark pair production cross sections at Tevatron and LHC, employing advanced resummation techniques and deriving precise finite-order results to improve accuracy and understanding of the process.

Contribution

It introduces next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic resummation and exact finite-order calculations for top-quark pair production, enhancing prediction precision.

Findings

Resummed cross sections with NNLL accuracy

Exact finite-order NNLO results near threshold

Reduced scale dependence and improved luminosity sensitivity

Abstract

We present an update of the theoretical predictions for the cross section of top-quark pair production at Tevatron and LHC. In particular we employ improvements due to soft gluon resummation at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. We expand the resummed results and derive analytical finite-order cross sections through next-to-next-to-leading order which are exact in all logarithmically enhanced terms near threshold. These results are the best present estimates for the top-quark pair production cross section. We investigate the scale dependence as well as the sensitivity on the parton luminosities.